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…
Read more
4 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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!
1 Like
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!
3 Likes
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!
1 Like
Hey, cool! How long did it take you to finish this project?
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
Nice project @PhilipCodes - a really polished result 
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 
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 
3 Likes
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.
4 Likes
Hi Phillip, I have intereste din a while in using bike pedals to ‘power’ an aircraft in X-Plane, from simple relative ‘Throttle’ percentage setting so i can fly anything just using pedals to give throttle setting to an actual Kw generated by user to see if i can actually get an aircraft off the ground!!1 ( or with a modifier number to allow gaming with pre built aircraft that relies upon user leg power) Can you assist - happy to chat about getting your time. For discussion - X-Plane 12 Desktop Manual | X-Plane
2 Likes
Hey, sounds like an interesting project! I’ve uploaded a minimal example of reading the bike pedalling on a PC. You’d need to do some calculations to convert the pedalling rate to KW which you could in theory map to a throttle. Not sure how you’d go about getting that into the game though.
https://github.com/boristsr/VirtualBikeRides/blob/triplogger/TripLogger/TripLogger.py
2 Likes
Hi Mark
I think people have been trying to do this since the Wright Brothers. I think some have managed a few metres a couple of metres above the ground but mostly disastrous crashes. I think the kW you generate with legs would have to be amplified somewhat to get any where near it.
Could be lots of fun though
Cheers Bob
Cheers Bob
1 Like
Hi Philip
If you have a throttle etc quadrant hack into the throttle pot.
Or use one of the “Leo Bodnar” boards from the UK. Google “Leo Bodnar”. I have one working with X-Plane and I have 10 rotary encoders and the pitch and roll pots of the Saitek flight yolk working via this board. These boards have lots of button inputs which can be configured in pairs for rotary encoder use and the last 4 are reserved for a hat switch. Also 8 (I think) analog inputs for potentiometer use.(Pitch and Roll in my case)
Cheers Bob
1 Like
