Project by PhilipCodes; Interactive Exercise Bike - Pedal Powered Visuals

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I have just shared a new project: “Interactive Exercise Bike - Pedal Powered Visuals”



This project turns a cheap exercise mini bike into a virtual bike. I made this project with my brother for a family member who has to do a few months of physical therapy. We wanted a way to motivate them to continue, and try to make it a fun game-li…

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I love how much thought you’ve put into challenges future makers might face making their own. For instance “What if they can’t find the same bike as me?”.
Great work; Good documentation.

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Hey @PhilipCodes,

What an awesome project! I love the debugging circles that made it into the final product. Having an on-screen goal to aim for seems appropriate and this is a very clean and unintrusive way to implement this.

I’m excited to see how this could be expanded upon in the future!

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Thanks! That actually came about from our own issues on the project, when we built bikes 2 and 3 we’d already had the first minibike for a while, so were genuinely concerned we wouldn’t be able to get it again. You know how quickly that cheap equipment can disappear from the market!

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Yeah it’s very cool to follow your nose on these kinds of projects and just go with what works if a cool idea pops up!

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Hey, cool! How long did it take you to finish this project?

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From concept to giving the present it took a little over a month with all the print iterations.

The physical build itself we were able to build bikes 2 & 3 at the same time in under 4 hours excluding print time.

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Nice project @PhilipCodes - a really polished result :smiley:

I spend a lot of time on YouTube
I wonder if something like this could hardware-gate my YT consumption… eg. the video only plays if I keep pedalling :joy:
I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to trigger a pause command when the pedals slow, and trigger a play command when they speed up over some threshold :grimacing:

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Thanks! Yeah to solve the experience of audio playback I had the idea of framing it like you had to maintain a “buffer” of pedals ahead of the video so you couldn’t slack off. You could definitely mix this idea in to starting and stopping YouTube. Just make the player app send a Play/Pause media key signal to the OS.

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