Longmont company’s gadget rides winds of change

LONGMONT — From tracking smoke from Colorado wildfires to studying storms and figuring out how weather affects the path of a baseball, the answers are blowing in the wind for a Longmont company.

Anemoment LLC co-founders Stephen and Liz Osborn have taken wind measurements to a new level, literally, by developing a tiny anemometer that can ride aboard an unmanned aerial vehicle — a drone — instead of being fixed in place or mounted aboard a manned aircraft. Their apple-sized TriSonica Mini weighs about two ounces, about the same as a tennis ball.

“We want to become known as a provider of groundbreaking tools to know what the weather’s doing in places you can’t get to with existing tools,” said Liz Osborn. “Lots of companies make anemometers, mechanical and ultrasonic. We’re new. We’re little. We can work with people who create new technologies for understanding, interpreting and influencing our environment in new ways.”

The Osborns’ product aims to fill the gap between consumer anemometers and traditional ground-fixed professional meteorology equipment. Those systems “are very expensive and are fixed to the ground,” Stephen Osborn said. “They have a bottom limit of how close to the ground they can measure. Above that, they’re great, but below that they just don’t do very well. With a UAV platform, we’re not fixed to the ground.

“If we want to go and understand what’s happening in Boulder Canyon, we can fly a UAV at various levels, at different times and different weather conditions, to get an understanding of how the mountains and the twists and turns of the canyon affect the air flow and stir the air with other elements.”

As wildfires rage in Colorado, Anemoment is working with a university and a company that are “researching how smoke plumes move, and what microbes are floating in that smoke and being dispersed to other parts of the world,” he said. “In the lower atmosphere, there’s a lot of interest, and we’d been unable to measure until we had UAV-based weather systems. We got into this market very early and are very lucky to be on the forefront of this.”

The TriSonica Mini also can aid research into climate change, he said.

“We can look for methane leaks from natural gas or natural methane sources, understanding where they are and what the effect of the methane is,” Stephen Osborn said. “Glaciers in Greenland are melting 50 years before models predicted. Mother Nature’s not wrong; our models are wrong. So we’re trying to understand how methane adjusts our climate models.”

He said the Mini can help weather researchers save money as well. “When you drop a dropsonde, there went $2,000 or $3,000 of instrumentation you may never get back,” he said. “But if I can put it on a UAV, send it up, bring it down and fly it back home, I preserve all that cost. And I can have extra instrumentation on there the dropsonde isn’t going to give me.”

The Mini has aviation applications as well, from studying the “boundary layer” that often gives airline passengers a bumpy ride as they descend into Denver International Airport to help crop dusters make sure they’re getting the proper amount of chemical onto their fields.

And then there are concerns that aren’t quite as serious but might spark much more consumer interest. Anemoment worked with Weather Applied Metrics, which specializes in computational fluid dynamics and 3D modeling, to enable viewers of Chicago Cubs baseball games on the Marquee Sports Network to see in real time, via on-screen graphics, the effect that wind, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure have on the trajectory of balls hit at Wrigley Field this season.

Stephen Osborn got into the weather game early. Growing up in windy western Nebraska, he always had an interest in meteorology. After six years in the Navy, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University.

“I graduated in 1988 at a time when technology jobs were scarce,” he said, “but I ended up at Rockwell, working on the space station. There’s product on the International Space Station that I designed; a remote power controller, an application-specific integrated circuit.”

Later, at Longmont-based Codar, he worked to make off-the-shelf computer equipment such as hard drives more rugged for use by the armed forces. “We were running disc drives at minus-55 degrees Celsius,” he said. “Those that didn›t survive we pulled out. Those that did, we sold to the military.”

Codar laid him off in 1993, three days before the company was merged into North American Industries. “Applied Technologies Inc. gave me a temp job two weeks later, which turned into six years’ employment.” That company’s ultrasonic anemometers were spun out from Ball Aerospace research in 1978, he said, and “with my embedded programming and design skills, we moved their product forward in technology.”

He left ATI in 2000 but began doing contract work for it five years later and realized there was a market niche for a “pro-sumer” anemometer. “How about I put a product right into this gap,” he thought, “one that more serious consumers would be interested in using, but also those people who need some of the functions of high-end anemometers but not everything.”

His original concept was far too big to ride on a drone. “I pushed it down smaller than my original comfort level but was pleased at how it worked at that size,” he said, “so that’s where we’re at now.”

He started making notes about his idea in 2006 and “started to come up with ideas about how to move this forward, but running this out of the basement and my own wallet meant things were going really slow. While working at Westminster-based contract engineering firm Syncroness, one of its owners pulled Osborn aside and said, “If we invest in setting up your company, we will help you move this forward as a product.” Osborn jumped on the chance. “They gave me some of the capital up front and some of the engineering resources necessary, especially on the mechanical engineering side — because I’m an electrical engineer — and we were able to flesh out and finalize the product details.

“The last 10% takes 90% of the resources. That’s where I was,” he said. “I didn›t have resources to buy plastic molds and do 100 circuit boards. That’s the hurdle Syncroness helped me get over, and then it spun us out into our own company.”

The Osborns founded Anemoment in January 2017, making and selling their gadget that measures wind velocity, direction, temperature, humidity and pressure. It outputs the data over a serial port. Anemoment also can provide a data-logger product that can store the telemetry and recover it after the UAV returns. “We’ll shortly be providing a radio link — or at least we’re considering it,” he said.

“That first year, each Mini was lovingly hand built,” he said. Since then they’re using Denver-based contract manufacturer Geotech Environmental, which also handles sales. A flat-based unit, which lets users customize their own mounts because every UAV is different, runs $1,350. Add $100 for a pipe mount.

“We’re in the mid-500s on serial numbers right now,” Stephen Osborn said. “Over the past three years we were probably up to producing 150 a year.”

The company’s sales also went global. Early last year it expanded its European footprint by naming Sparv Embedded AB, a Swedish engineering firm, as one of its authorized international distributors.

“Prior to COVID, we were doubling revenue every year until this year. At the beginning of this year we were expecting to almost double our sales. We were hoping to be in an actual facility with one or more employees, and that did not happen.”

Anemoment now contracts for marketing, bookkeeping and accounting, and “we can always call on Syncroness for design resources if we need it,” he said. Liz Osborn “is an attorney, and that’s why she’s CEO; she has a much better feel for marketing.”

The company’s future is a family affair as well. Their four children, all of whom are entering STEM fields, are investors in their company, and one son, a student at Colorado State University, is helping design an improved Mini.

“It’s a similar product with greater precision,” Stephen Osborn said. “Tim is focusing on fluid dynamics, like dams, aqueducts and pipes — all the things that civil engineers do with water. Flow is flow, whether it’s water or air, so we’ve been benefiting from his fluid dynamics work” to develop an even better anemometer whose range of sensing won’t be blocked by the device’s structure.

Added Liz Osborn, “Tim’s name will be on the patent.”

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