Have you ever wondered how fast the air comes out of those newly designed hand dryers? Or perhaps how loud in decibels the fan is. The iPad is a great device for answering this and many other questions on the fly.
In order to explore the above two questions, a Pasco PASPORT Anemometer sensor was used to measure the wind speed of the dryer. In this case, a PASPORT AirLink2 transmitted wind speed data to an iPad using the SparkVue HD app.

The result was about about 25 m/s or, according to my iPad’s unit converting app, 56 miles per hour. The sensor has a maximum rating of 29 m/s. Some quick tests by several humans exhaling (blowing) into the sensor topped out about 16 m/s in case you are wondering.
The next question, the one about the loudness of the hand dryer was answered by running the decibel meter in an iPad app called Measures HD.
An iPad mini was inserted into the hand dryer, and the maximum decibel reading was recorded along with both a graph of the action, and a comparison to a common environment. As you can see in the video, the decibel level more than doubled from 45 to 95.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-a9_6vuM1Y[/youtube]
The next exploration…see if an inverse relationship is found between air speed and air pressure found (and graphed) as the sensors are moved back and forth or up and down within the hand dryer.