After modifying his new manual treadmill to fit under his standing desk, [Brian Peiris] found a way to let him stroll all over the internet.
After removing the treadmill’s original time/distance display, [Peiris] reverse engineered the speed sensor to send data to an Arduino and his PC. We’ve seen a number of projects that interface treadmills with virtual worlds, but what really makes this project stand out is a simple script using the Throxy Python library which allows the treadmill to throttle his machine’s internet connection.
The end result is a browsing experience that reacts to how fast the user runs. In the demonstration video, you can see Peiris tiptoe through images or jog through YouTube videos. A minimum bandwidth setting keeps the connection live, so if you can’t make it all the way through that HD Netflix movie, taking a breather won’t time out the connection.
It’s certainly a great way to get in shape, or at the very least, it’ll make your ISP’s bandwidth cap feel a lot bigger.
Video after the jump.
This one makes me think of Reamde (a Neal Stephenson book that I think is being turned into a TV miniseries). One of the characters is responsible for generating the back story for an MMORPG. His workstation is a set of robot arms hanging from the ceiling. As he runs on a treadmill it moves his computer and desk so that it bobs up and down in unison with him.
and then?
Stephenson has a habit of coming up with ideas in his sci-fi books that make it into reality. Snow Crash has 2 or 3 if I remember correctly.
With $1500 and the right hookup, you can be a Gargoyle too.
This sounds great, but sooner or later lcd and keyboard would fall apart from all the forces involved in bobbing up and down :/
“I lost 150 lbs watching porn and so can you!”
You sir are epic.. I needed that laugh.
Of course, I could imagine the accidents would be epic fails!
I guess that’s what they would call real coordination. Fapping while jogging on a tread mill fast enough to keep the internet connection going. I doubt you lost that much weight with just jogging.
You know that at the very least that one person has probably attempted it.
I saw something kind of like this once. It used an exercise bike connected to Google’s street view map system to make it seem like you are riding through some town or country road. I’d like to see that implemented here. Shouldn’t be too hard. Just replace the bike with the treadmill and done.
stick an oculus rift on that and you’ll never have to go outside again!
That’s a real product now, you can buy exercise bikes with Google Maps and some with Google Streetview integration.
That’s awesome! He needs to couple this with the Jawbone UP or Fitbit API so your bandwidth is a function of your total daily movement. Not to mention with this method you won’t run out of bandwidth when your watching pr0n… well not until you’re finished anyway.
Good idea!!! If you work on the computer and do not have time to exercise, this is a great idea. Thank you!!!