Two men in black shirts stand between a white and a blue exercise bike sitting on a table in front of them. The exercise bikes have black drums slightly larger than a coffee can affixed to the front of the bike which houses the shredding mechanism. In the background is a "Precious Plastics Torino" circular logo.

Getting Shredded Plastic…and Legs

While electric motors have taken the drudgery out of many tasks, human power has its advantages. [Precious Plastic Torino] has developed a human-powered plastic shredder for those times when an electric motor just won’t do.

Designed primarily for educational purposes at venues where electricity can be difficult to source, but also useful for off-grid environments, this exercise bike-based shredder can take small pieces of plastic and shred them into tiny pieces suitable for use with any of the other machines in the Precious Plastics ecosystem like their injection molding machine. As with all [Precious Plastics] projects, the files are will be open source; however, there is a six month exclusivity period for Patreon subscribers to help fund development efforts.

The build is relatively simple: take an old exercise bike, remove the unnecessary bits, and run the chain up to drive a shredding mechanism mounted on the front of the bike. We think they should’ve kept the flywheel to help keep the momentum going while shredding but can’t fault them for wanting to keep the prototype as simple as possible. Maybe the next step is getting these in spin classes around the country so people can get their exercise and help recycle in their community at the same time!

If this shredder doesn’t suit your fancy, maybe recycle your plastic with SHREDII or this other DIY effort. If you’d rather generate electricity on your exercise bike, then try building this bike generator.

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An exercise bike modified to become a game controller

Pedal Your Way Through Games With This USB Exercise Bike

If you’re into cycling, there’s nothing better than heading out on the open road and feeling the wind in your hair. Unfortunately, climatic conditions make this uncomfortable or impossible at certain times of year, so you might be tempted to stay inside and play video games instead. Luckily, you can now get your gaming fix and still get in shape thanks to [Patrick]’s exercise bike game controller.

Two 3D-printed boxes with buttons and joysticks, to be attached to a bike's handlebar[Patrick] got himself a second-hand exercise bike and discovered that the speed sensor inside it was based on a magnet and reed relay, just like a regular bike computer. Reading out the sensor was therefore as simple as counting pulses using an Arduino Leonardo, and the USB HID protocol made it easy to turn the cycling mechanism into a one-dimensional game controller.

He then completed the setup by adding two 3D-printed handlebar-mounted gamepads with a few buttons and a thumbstick on each side. The total system now works as an ordinary gamepad, but with the option of using the bike as a forward/backward control.

We can imagine that this system will stay interesting for far longer than any off-the-shelf internet-connected exercise bike, because you can interface it with basically any game. [Patrick] demos his rig using first-person shooters like Doom and Team Fortress 2, but the possibilities are endless: how about turning FIFA games into bike polo? Or Mirror’s Edge into a bicycle courier adventure? After all, we’ve already seen how a similar game controller can turn Grand Theft Auto into something more like Grand Theft Bicycle.

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Pedaling Away Under The Cover Of Your Desk

[Wayne Venables], like many of us, found himself sitting more than usual the past few months.  Armed with a Bluetooth-enabled under desk exercise bike, he quickly found the app to be rather sub-optimal and set about reverse-engineering the protocol of his bike.

Custom GUI for the exercise bike

The first step was to use some apps on his Android phone to reveal the profiles on the bike, which showed his particular machine used a Nordic Bluetooth UART. This meant the only work would be decoding the stream of bytes coming off the wireless serial port. Using Wireshark and Bluetooth logs on his phone, [Wayne] was able to correspond the various commands to points in the video. There were still a few bytes that he wasn’t able to identify, but [Wayne] had enough to whip up a quick .NET app that can start a workout and log it all to a database. The code for his app is on his GitHub.

While [Wayne] doesn’t specifically name the bike he uses in this project, we tracked down the image he shows on his writeup to the Exerpeutic 900e. It appears to be discontinued but the reverse engineering approach should be usable on a range of Bluetooth-connected machines. This isn’t the first bike we’ve seen liberated by reverse engineering here at Hackaday. And we have a feeling it won’t be the last.

A Deep Dive Into The Sterzo Steering Plate

Pedaling in place isn’t the most exciting pastime, so it’s no surprise that modern technology is being used to make the in-home biking experience a bit more interactive. With a stand on the rear wheel providing resistance, and a movable steering plate under the front to read the handlebar angle, you can now use your standard bike as the “controller” in a virtual environment provided by software such as Zwift.

Paving the way towards a DIY Sterzo clone

[Keith Wakeham] wanted to take a closer look at how Zwift communicated with his Sterzo steering device, and it turned into a pretty epic bout of exploration and reverse engineering. As the video after the break shows, he didn’t just go from sniffing the device’s proprietary Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communications protocol to figuring out how to emulate it in software so you could roll your own Zwift peripheral. He also tore the device apart, pulled the firmware from its microcontroller, and postulated how you could build your own low-cost clone device that would work with the existing software.

Even if you have absolutely zero interest in virtual biking, the video [Keith] has put together for this project is really a must watch. Have you ever wanted to sniff and reverse engineer BLE communications? Looking for a real-world example of pulling the firmware off of a consumer device? Maybe in the market for some tips on how to identify unknown ICs on a board? All of that, and quite a bit more, is covered in this nearly hour long hacking tour de force.

On the other hand, if you are interested in adding your own hardware to Zwift, then this look at getting an unsupported stationary bike working with it should be useful.

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Hackaday Podcast 079: Wobble Sphere, Pixelflut, Skeeter Traps, And Tracing Apps

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gaze upon the most eye-popping projects from the past week. Who would have known that springy doorstops could be so artistic? Speaking of art, what happens if you give everyone on the network the chance to collectively paint using pixels? There as better way to catch a rat, and a dubious way to lure mosquitoes. We scratch our heads at sending code to the arctic, and Elliot takes a deep look at the contact tracing apps developed and in use throughout Europe.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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Shed Pounds And Inches While Binge Watching Netflix

Feel like breaking out of your streaming-induced vegetative state but can’t seem to break the binge-watching cycle? Maybe you’re a candidate for this exercise bike that controls how much Netflix you watch.

The concept behind [Roboro]’s anti-couch potato build is simple — just keep pedaling and you get to keep watching. The details are pretty simple too and start with an Arduino monitoring the signal coming from a jack thoughtfully provided by the manufacturer of his exercise bike. The frequency of the square wave is translated into a speed which a Python script on a PC reads over USB. Once a Netflix stream is started, dropping below the user-defined speed pauses the movie. The video below shows it doing its thing.

Improvements readily spring to mind, like adding a speed buffer so that pedaling faster lets you bank some streaming time and earn a rest. Maybe it could somehow integrate with these Netflix-enabled socks, or even with the Netflix and Chill button. But those sort of defeat the purpose a bit.

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Adding A Heart Rate Monitor To Your Exercise Equipment

This is the readout which [Remick] added to his stationary bicycle. It displays heart rate, calories burned, and a few other items to help motivate his workout routine.

Back when he was ordering a TI Chronos watch he also picked up a heart rate chest strap and receiver. The receiver can be read using a UART, making it easy to interface with the ATmega328 which drives the system. The screen is a graphic LCD, which gave him a lot of control on how to organize the displayed data. Three buttons on the side operate the menu system into which a user can enter sex, age, and weight information. This is used to calculate the calories burned and the percentage of maximum heart rate. The three readouts to the right are for time spent in each workout zone (fat burning, fitness, or performance). The final product looks great because of the PCB he etched and the case he housed it in.