This blog will host the progress of a couple high school students—Paul Biberstein, Liam Grogan, and Jacob Selian—on their path to bring a product concept from inception to full realization.

What product exactly? Well, the idea started back in the Winter of 2018. The three high school students, each avid members of Freeport High School's alpine ski race team, found themselves training late into the night at Lost Valley ski mountain. Nocturnal practices were required, as the few days of the week the team could secure a bus to make the 40 minute journey to the mountain needed to be maximized, so they would spend hours on the mountain, skiing a set of slalom gates, then going back up the lift and doing it again.

The arduous journey from Freeport to Lost Valley

Somewhere along the way, an idea came into being. If our opportunities to train are so few and far between, why not make the most of the times when we can train. Specifically, why don't we time our runs down the practice course so we can see which techniques improve our time and which ones make us slower.

Surely a brilliant idea, but the logistical problems of watches and phone stopwatches mounted up and the trio soon realized that this was no small task. In fact, many larger corporations had made just such consumer grade wireless timing systems in the past. However, these kits would go for somewhere in the range of a few thousand dollars or more.

The boys were convinced they could do it for less and were further encouraged as time progressed. Other team's coaches expressed interest, and as the track and field season began it became clear that a similar timing system would be indispensable to dedicated sprinters as well as skiers. 

So, as many enterprising entrepreneurs had done before them, they set out with he noble cause of making a cheaper product for a stagnant industry, and to hopefully provide a blog along the way to help future young engineers to understand the more esoteric parts of microcontrollers, engineering, and design.