alt Hacker NewsI Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers
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Lovely idea, always nice to put something together and scratch that itch.
What you need is a small weight or something that rises up a pole depending on how hard you hit it, a great visualisation.
You could even have a bell at the top, so if this small weight hits it with enough voom it could making a resounding ding sound, so life affirming.
Perhaps you could charge a 'apenny a go, and give a prize for those that can do it. Saying Roll up Roll up to passers by in a local fair.
"High Striker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_striker
Is anyone else bothered that this was run through an LLM before publication? The tone is a distraction for me.
So how does the power meter itself actually work? How do you know the output is accurate? How much power is lost from the measurement due to dampening? How do you know it will hold up to cycling in such an aggressive environment? That's kind of the interesting thing here, but there's no mention of it in the article.
Cool idea, just wondering why you wouldn't travel during a sabbatical.
> a paid month off
that's not a sabbatical anyway, is it? i thought this was 6-12 months, not one?
https://intensity.systems/ is currently unstyled.
Post also has some LLM sniffs, so I'm unsure how much of the content is true.
>After five years at Shopify, employees get a paid month off to do whatever the hell they want. I took mine in April 2026.
Bleak.. Only a month after five years.
I'd think that electronic drum heads would provide a good prototype. I really know nothing about it, so I could easily be wrong, but the basics are all there... They are percussive, and the sound varies by how hard they are hit, so there has to be something like a power meter going on.
Maybe someone else knows more?
I believe there are already various, martial arts related, striking meters - to show how hard you are punching/kicking. Isn't this rather similar (but I guess not mounted vertically and calibrated for harder hits)?
I could see this being used for fitness tests for cross country skiers. A very common exercise is med-ball slams. These aren’t a perfect analog to double poling but definitely close.
Being able to track your one rep max force you can generate could be an interesting metric especially for sprinters
> People I look up to include Frank Zappa, Richard Feynman, J.K. Rowling, Peter Norvig, and Geoffrey Hinton.
TFW you want to seem intellectual
I could see this becoming a tiebreaker or ranking device for lumberjack competitions.
Have you met shovelglove?
You remind me of a saying: Boring things are actually interesting.
Charpy would like a word.
I'm 13 years into my career and I haven't taken more than 5 days off in a row. That's usually a family reunion.
I think 4-8 weeks to recharge and reset would be helpful. What's the research say?
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Aye, author here. Pleased it's getting visibility ofc, but ABSOLUTELY not expecting to get traction this early.
Please pardon the AI-generated placeholder images and some of the text at https://intensity.systems, I'm still very actively working on that.