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.

33 thoughts on “Shed Pounds And Inches While Binge Watching Netflix

  1. Also I doubt it’s the same for everybody but I’m finding distractions actually improve my exercise endurance significantly. In my case I think it’s partly a matter of keeping me from noticing my own breathing and getting it stuck in the conscious action arena.

    1. it’s a common trope in sports, distracting yourself from the effort. You might need a watchdog, tho, because you might slow down while thinking about something else.

      1. Now that I think about it, Last time I saw it in media was in Rick And Morty where he creates and tricks an entire civilization to power his car in a variation of the concept. I think I can count it as the same setup right?

    1. In Canada we use metric primarily but we still use imperial units to measure body weight, the increments are more practical, same thing in construction with feet and inches.

      I guess I kind of assumed most of the rest of the world did the same, is this not case? Excuse my ignorance.

  2. Wow, I had a lot of trouble with this title. I had a vision of a robotic shed inching towards the back door and pounding on it to get my attention away from Westworld…

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