Now dirt jumpers and slopestylers can become stats obsessed app-slaves too with Shredmate, the gizmo that logs airtime and landing force.

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We’ve not had a wacky or eye-catching Kickstarter story for awhile have me? Time was when you couldn’t move for madcap mountain biking gizmos on the money-raising website.

Either we’ve all got a bit jaded or maybe the whole Kickstarter goldrush reached peak-madcap last year. Whatever, here’s something new that’s popped up that is at least genuinely interesting.

The Shredmate is a compact plastic thingummybob that you ziptie on to your bike (your fork to be precise) and it measures how much time you spend in the air during a ride or jump sesh.

There’s an attendant phone app that connects to the Shredmate strap-on via Bluetooth and shows you all your “exciting new information”.

The people behind Shredmate essentially wanted to create a bike computer that recorded the things that other bike computers don’t. Namely, how much time you spend in the air and how smooth your landings are. Shredmate will also record all the other usual stuff that bike computers do (distance, max speed, average speed etc).

As well as logging airtime for bragging rights and ‘just because’ reasons, one of Shredmate’s aim is to improve your riding. Or rather, your jumping. Bigger jumps. Smoother landings. That sort of thing.

You can also display all of your ride’s peak G-force moments so you can see just what are your bendiest and dippiest tracks.

Shredmate shows your route as a trace that changes colour depending on how fast you go. Red for fast, green for slow (is it just us or should this be the other way around?) Anyway, that’s a nice bit of pseudo-World Cup graphics that is instantly appealing to folk.

Shredmate is a UK-based project. They’ve been working on the project for the past year and has been testing out prototype units at various locations.

If you’re interested, Kickstarter backing starts from £50.

Shredmate founder Chris Irlam: “Most cycle computers are designed for riding on tarmac and give the same standard speed and distance info. We wanted to make something specifically for mountain bikers and give them some interesting data too. We love going out on trails and leaving the tarmac behind, it would be great if we could map where the jumps are, record what we did on them and measure what g-forces we felt.”

“A couple of years ago I was teaching myself how to jump on a mountain bike, but found no way of tracking my improvement. We decided to fix this problem by developing Shredmate. Once we added the motion sensor to track jumps, it soon became clear we could do so much more. Through careful optimisation of our algorithms, Shredmate can track g-forces, detect individual trails and measure your jump landing g-force. By training to reduce your jump landing g-force, Shredmate can help improve your flow.”