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 
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 
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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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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
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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
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