The Rowing in Motion Smartphone Mount
Smartphones are a great tool to track your rowing workouts and performance. However, you need to take them with you on the water and attach them to the boat one way or another so that an App (e.g. Rowing in Motion) can use the integrated sensors to capture speed and stroke-rate.
Every boat is a bit unique and finding a good spot to securely attach your smartphone is not always straightforward and so far required a bit of tinkering. Add to that moving between boats or seats frequently and your clubs’ boat mechanic will soon start disliking you for modifying every shell in the club. Fortunately, we now have a solution for that.
The new Rowing in Motion Smartphone Mount fits any smartphone or smartphone-case and can be attached to wing riggers or to the deck (2-in-1). The mount is made from solid, brushed stainless steel. Intelligently placed foam paddings ensure it won’t scratch your boat, secure your device in a fixed position and also dampen any vibrations to improve measurement accuracy. You can purchase the mount from our online store now. The package includes everything you need to get started and we can ship it to you internationally.
Mounting Options
In all cases your smartphone(-case) attaches to the faceplate of the mount using the supplied Dual Lock synthetic velcro strips. Stick these to the back of your smartphone(-case) and “click” your smartphone(-case) in and out of them every time you go out on the water. If you already have a waterproof smartphone, you can use one of those inexpensive silicon sleeves available for almost any smartphone model (e.g. Mumbi and similar) to avoid sticking the Dual Lock directly to your smartphone.
Mount on a Wing Rigger
The bracket has slots for two detachable, self-locking velcro straps that you can wrap around a wing rigger so that the bracket clings to the tip of the rigger.
The profile of the bracket ensures minimal elevation above the rigger, typically 1-3cm depending on your smartphone’s size, to leave good clearance for the hands while rowing.
The angle of the bracket provides for a good reading angle in sunlight. Using the velcro straps the mount can be quickly and easily ported between boats.
Mounting on the Deck
Though the majority of new boats has them, not all boats have wing riggers. Or maybe you even have one of those fancy bow-wing riggers? Our smartphone mount covers that use case as well. It has a piece of 3M Dual Lock synthetic velcro on the underside and comes with a counterpart you can stick on any surface, e.g. the deck behind the stroke seat.
The deck mount also works very well for mounting a smartphone in front of the cox in a bow-steered boat.
Benefits of using the RiM Smartphone Mount
Despite offering a comfortable and portable smartphone mounting solution in one kit, there are additional benefits to using our smartphone mount.
The most frequent type of customer support request we receive for our rowing app deals with smartphone mounting or mounting related issues. When your smartphone isn’t securely attached to the shell, the sensors will register too many vibrations, e.g. from your sliding seat rolling on the slides or the oars rotating in the oarlocks, which adds significant noise to the sensor data. Even worse, the calibration gets thrown off when the device changes its angle relative to the boat. Remember, we want to measure the precise movement of the rowing shell, so we need the smartphone to be rigidly attached to the shell.
Noise in sensor data (yellow) affects measurement quality.
The Rowing in Motion smartphone mount solves these problems. The foam paddings we use mechanically dampen the transfer of vibrations from the boat to the bracket. The bracket is built from very sturdy stainless steel and doesn’t amplify the induced vibrations as many other mounts do when they form a swing-arm. At the same time the friction they create between the mounting surface and the bracket as well as the faceplate and the smartphone ensures everything stays in place and doesn’t move.
The smartphone mounting kit is available for purchase in our new online store.