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Ski Season Is Over But This Project Is Worth Posting Any Time

Check out this project from Dwight Eppinger, the Interactive Marketing Manager at Copper Mountain Ski Resort.

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Dwight Eppinger is the Interactive Marketing Manager at Colorado's Copper Mountain Ski Resort. Essentially, he has the coolest job ever, as he gets to float between working on Copper's cool marketing campaigns, playing with electronics, and hitting the slopes. Dwight figured out a great way to fuse electronics with his job, creating a unique system to keep ski patrol and the folks on the slopes updated on the condition of ski runs. During the beginning stages, it looked a little something like this:

That's a lot of wires! Dwight is using some LED Matrices, an Arduino board, XBee, and a host of other parts to build his system. Dwight installed his system into signs to create a status board and map of the ski resort.

We liked Dwight's project so much, we put him in one of our ads! We packed up our gear and headed to Copper Mountain to shoot the photo which you may have seen in your favorite magazine (or even in the electronic version of Wired - check out around the 2:57 mark of this video). Here's a little "behind-the-scenes" footage of the photoshoot and an interview with Dwight!

Awesome work Dwight! Read more about Dwight and his project at his blog.


Comments 5 comments

  • Porto / about 14 years ago / 1

    Great story! I have very little to no programming knowledge. With the Arduino my programming skills have increase exponentially. If I could just find enough time to get away from the family to do my projects.

  • sheetzam / about 14 years ago / 1

    In keeping with the fantastic geek site that Sparkfun is, your ads need QR codes to bring folks to the stories behind each of these ads, like this one.

  • I loved this story. What I liked most is how he, without knowing much about electronics and programming, managed to pull the idea off. He was persistent and eager to learn. How nice to see how when we are young we don't care for failure and we simply brush it off and keep pushing forward. Excellent project and great spirit! Awesome work Dwight!

  • Tim-BrendensDad / about 14 years ago / 1

    This is a great story. My son is 13 and I just bought him a second Arduino board, he lost the first one on the way down from 96,000 feet. It was in a High Altitude Balloon experiment, he also lost some other gear at the same time. You can read about it here www.BrendenGeary.com
    Thanks,
    Tim

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