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Using the Smart Watch App

1. Mount the watch on the rod

Items needed: Android Watch with watch band still on, fly rod, 3 inch rubber band. (if your watch doesn't have an internal speaker, you can pair it with Bluetooth earbuds or a Bluetooth speaker to hear your casts.)

Step 1: Loop the rubber band a couple times at the front of the rod grip.

Step 2: Place the watch on top of the blank and pull its watch-band back under the rubber band.

Step 3: Grip the rod with a thumb-on-top gripe style. Hold the watch band down against the grip with your thumb.

2. Launch Skill Shaper

Install it, if you have not already done so and click on its icon:

3. Select a different skill (optional)

If you want to change the type of feedback for SkillShaper to produce, scroll the watch screen upwards and select one of the checkboxes that appear.

"Main Stroke" is the default skill. You will hear the force (acceleration) of your rod along the path of your cast, throughout your whole stroke. The more the force: the higher the pitch and louder the sound will be.
The key to an efficient cast is being able to make your strokes start slowly and accelerate smoothly to a crisp stop. It produces longer casts with less effort.

"Stops" Focus on how well you are stopping your strokes. There will be no sound during the strokes of your back- and fore-casts, but you will hear it when you put on the brakes at the end.
Sharper stops make higher pitched sounds than softer stops. Other things being equal, the cast with a sharper stop will be one with a tighter loop.
Controlling the size of your loops by controlling the crispness of your stops is a critical skill, especially when casting in a wind or reaching for distance.

"Straight Line" Select "Straight". Now you will hear a high-pitched tone as the rod veers to one side or the other of your main stroke. To develop the muscle memory of a straight cast stroke, practice casting until you hear no sound at all.

4. Pair with a smart phone

Your Android watch can can be paired with an Android phone and stream its accelerometer data where the phone can play it aloud, display a graph of your casting session, and store the data for later study.

You might do this for several reasons:

1. No speaker. If your Android Watch does not have an internal speaker, you can pair it with an Android phone running SkillShaper to play the sounds while you cast. An alternative to this is to pair your watch with a Bluetooth speaker.

2. More volume. If you want the sound to be louder than the watch speakers can make. This can make it easier for others to hear your casts while you are casting (a coach, maybe, or a student).

3. Detailed study If you want to study a cast at a later time, pairing the watch with a phone lets you send the session data to the phone which can display a detailed chart of your cast and send a data file to your email account for permanent storage and study.

5. Start a casting session

Press the green START button. This turns on the accelerometer in the watch, starts the sound-playing program and if the watch is paired with a phone, starts streaming the data to the phone.
As you start moving the rod around, you will hear it, and you will see numbers changing on the screen. These are the accelerometer readings (in gravity units) on the 3 axes of space relative to the watch face: left/right, up/down and close/far.

Begin casting - and listen to your movements.

6. Stop a session

Press the red button labelled STOP

If you had been paired with a smart phone, you can send a data file to your desktop for later review and analysis.

Go to the phone screen and press the SEND button at the bottom of the screen. Wait a few seconds while the phone's app processes the data and creates a data file attachment.

Then follow the on-screen instructions to email the data to the email address of your choice.

Be sure to obey the "Pease Wait" messages before proceeding at each step!