Technology

Bringing Together a Variety of Specialties

Jolly Logic’s goal is to create delightful products that are simple, reliable and powerful. Doing this requires the orchestration of a wide range of technologies and expertise, all of which must work in harmony.

 Jolly Logic’s products are designed and assembled in the USA.

Mobile First

Jolly Logic believes that mobile devices like phones and tablets aren’t just one more way of computing—they are the first choice of computing. Jolly Logic products are used in a wide variety of places around the world including urban parks, rural farms, and remote deserts and in many cases mobile computing is the ONLY type of computing available. The wireless communication capabilities in mobile devices provide convenient remote control and easy sharing of your flights with your friends and colleagues around the world.

Jolly Logic was the first flight altimeter to be approved by Apple as an official Made for iPhone/iPad accessory, and we’re also proud that our products play well with Google Android as well.

Power Management

New battery chemistries and power management techniques are fueling a wave of mobility that allows us to take products everywhere we need them. Jolly Logic’s products use the same suite of Lithium battery technologies that power cutting-edge notebook computers, cell phones, and cars—with the added challenge of radically small size. Each altimeter’s central processor can selectively shut down each subsystem (and itself) to save power.

Sensors

A quiet revolution is underway, led by the introduction of sensors in everyday devices. Sensors can detect location, motion, altitude, orientation, temperature, and light and allow us to create devices that respond in more natural and helpful ways. The accuracy of our altimeters relies on highly-accurate pressure and temperature sensors that are sampled over 20 times a second. AltimeterTwo and AltimeterThree have three-axis accelerometers that help them sense acceleration up to 64 gees, calculate speed and detect bumps and jolts in any direction.

Materials Science

It is important that our products be tough and reliable, so that every flight can be a success. Jolly Logic products were the first commercial flight altimeters to fly in model rocket fuselages, where they are exposed to the explosive forces of parachute ejection charges. So at Jolly Logic materials really matter!

We manufacture our latest product Chute Release with both a strong “bulletproof” polycarbonate shell as well as precisely-machined aircraft aluminum components. After machining, we coat the metal parts with Teflon so that they do not need lubrication in the field.

Distributed Computing

You wouldn’t think that building neat products for hobby flyers would require anything of this nature, but modern demands for information sharing, rich user interfaces, and rapid product innovation require our products to work with other computing platforms to work most powerfully.

For instance, AltimeterThree has a powerful 32-bit processor, but it also borrows a bit of the computing power (and GPS location, and the clock) from your phone or tablet to produce its results. Part of its intelligence also lives on a server—every time you launch the app, your altimeter chats with a cloud server to see if there is a software update available. If there is, the update is downloaded from the cloud to the mobile device, then to the altimeter. New features flow from our design studio, up to the cloud, down to your phone, and out to your altimeter with no wires. Automatically!