Issue v0.12 – Meet the LED Snowboard

Fashion is an important part of the snowboarding scene, and a board tricked out with LED lights will certainly make you stand out on the slopes.

The LED Snowboard kit, available next year, will equip your board with 64 LEDs that light up in red, green and blue, in a variety of patterns. It even includes a USB port, allowing you to upload new lighting schemes. The kit will sell for $150, including a rechargeable battery, charger, controller box, two 1 meter long LED strips, and everything you need to mount it on your board.

The team behind the kit has spent most of 2012 testing protoypes to ensure that it’s rugged enough to endure the treatment that snowboards take. Inventor Nason Tackett says that “people go crazy” when they see an LED Snowboard in action. “…Especially at night when you can really see it. But even during the day you can see the lights and we get a lot of comments while in the lift line.

“People of all ages show interest when we are testing on the slopes. I think we get the most reaction from the 6-18 year-old age group, but there are quite a few 18-30 year olds interested as well.”

While the kit may be mainly designed to make your board look cool, it has a more practical use, too. “At night it adds the safety factor that people can see you,” says Tackett. “We are talking with ski patrol about building a special version so that people can identify them.”

As for the future, there are plenty of other ideas Tackett would like to try, including smartphone-based control for which patterns are displayed, and an OLED covering that would turn snowboards into video screens.