Surely everyone who picked up a pair of Nikeâs limited-edition HyperAdapt self-lacing shoes had at least some small desire to rip them open to find out how they worked. But at $700 a pop, itâs an easy enough urge to suppress. The nice thing about the internet, however, is that we often can count on someone else to do our dirty work for us.
Bay Area-based engineering company Mindtribe tore into a pair of the Back to the Future-inspired sneaks to find out what drives their relatively compact auto-tightening system, no doubt to the chagrin of the innovation team at Nike.
The teardown reveals a few interesting tidbits about the system, including a âperipheral connector, which has several unpopulated pins, and even a 3-pin header coming off of it with nothing connected to the other end.â The company suggests this could point to a modular system with peripherals being rolled out for later.
The easy money points to a pedometer for future Nike+ integration â something the company told us it had considered, in an interview around the shoesâ release. A slightly more far-out idea suggests a kinetic-powered system that uses steps to power the shoesâ batteries.
The teardown also revealed an ARM Cortex M4, a mobile processor that seems like a lot of firepower for a self-lacing shoe and, again, could point to something larger down the road.
