exercise

33 Articles

Make Your Treadmill More Entertaining For $0

September 7, 2013 by 20 Comments

Treadmill Computer

Treadmills can often be found on the side of the road, after someone gave up on their running regimen and found that the machine was taking up too much space in their basement. This is great for hackers, since they have some useful parts in them.

However, if you’d like to actually use a treadmill for running, some entertainment would certainly help. [KingJackOff] decided to roll his own treadmill entertainment system out of things he had lying around, bringing the total cost to $0.

He took an old laptop and mounted it in a piece of rigid foam using a gratuitous amount of duct tape. With the screen and keyboard mounted, he added speakers and a slot for the DVD drive. Then a printed graphic was taped to the front, with a nice motivational message.

Lots of people have old laptops lying around with mechanical issues. Broken hinges and frames make them unusable, even though the electronics are fine. Some foam and paper could be all you need to bring one back to life.

[via Reddit]

Personal Energy Orb Prevents Your Life From Being Swallowed By The Internets

September 25, 2012 by 14 Comments

We love the Internet, but we are definitely guilty of losing track of the time we spend traipsing around our virtual haunts. This project will not only remind you to get out and exercise, it will cripple your digital experience if you don’t heed its colorful warning.

[Janko Hofmann] calls it the Personal Energy Orb. It’s really just an Arduino and an RGB LED. But as with most creations, the idea is what makes it great. The orb has a dock next to your computer. It tracks how much time you spend online, changing colors as you rack up the hours. If you don’t heed the warning signs of overuse it will even start to slow down your mouse cursor. But never fear. Full functionality can be restored by topping off your personal energy. As you can see above, there’s also a docking station on [Janko’s] bicycle. The orb monitors your mileage, moving out of the red zone so that your computer will be unencumbered the next time you sit down for a long session of flash games. Don’t miss his video presentation embedded after the break.

Continue reading “Personal Energy Orb Prevents Your Life From Being Swallowed By The Internets” →

Adding A Heart Rate Monitor To Your Exercise Equipment

July 12, 2012 by 5 Comments

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.

Dual-monitor Work Stations Aims To Keep You On The Treadmill Longer

March 6, 2012 by 7 Comments

In an effort keep his workout schedule on track [Jamie] built himself this dual-screen treadmill work station. He picked up the treadmill for about $50 on eBay, and after some follies with its shoddy construction, ended up with a pretty nice setup.

The first rendition of this project was just a wooden shelf to hold a laptop. But after the treadmill fell apart, sending his laptop tumbling, he reinforced the machine and added a bunch of stuff in the process. There’s now some custom electronics used to track his progress. He painted a white square on the black belt that makes up the running surface. That is monitored by a PIC microcontroller via a phototransistor and op-amp. He uses a USB data acquisition card to feed the belt-revolution count to the computer for use in tracking his workouts.

The presence of a computer in his setup would make Internet logging a snap too. The exercise bike we looked at on Saturday used a direct Ethernet connection for its logging, but [Jamie’s] setup could be used in the same way. He just needs a script to bridge the collected data with an Internet logging site’s API.

Non-invasive AC Power Adapter For Exercise Equipment

October 13, 2011 by 27 Comments

We often look at battery-operated hardware and shake our heads at the wastefulness of throwing away disposable batteries. There are some devices that minimize the waste, like those TV remotes that seem to never need new cells. But the C cells that [Quinn Dunki] kept replacing in her elliptical trainer were only lasting about three months at a time. The manufacturer hadn’t cared enough to build a power jack into the machine, so she built her own AC adapter without modifying the stock hardware.

The first thing she did was to patch in a couple of wires between two of the batteries. This let her measure the current consumption, which topped out at around 200mA. This is good news because that’s easily sourced with a cheap linear regulator. Out of the junk box came a 12V/1A wall wart transformer, which just leaves the need for a fuse and some capacitors to finish out a voltage regulator circuit.

Since [Quinn] didn’t want to permanently alter the exerciser, she came up with a way that it could take the same physical space as the batteries. Two long stand-offs are used as prongs to interface the spring terminals in the battery compartment. They attach to a piece of protoboard which hosts the rest of the circuitry. Now she just needs to remember to unplug this from the wall after each session and she’ll be in business.

The Quest To Build A Better Stairmaster

November 24, 2010 by 22 Comments

[Eric Feldman] likes to use the Stairmaster in his exercise routine during the winter months. But apparently the exercisers that are designed for mere mortals don’t satisfy his need to climb stairs really, really, quickly. After mastering the upper speed limits of some top-of-the-line equipment he contacted the company asking if there was a way to unlock the software-imposed speed restriction. They laughed at him; a motivation that he used to build his own that is already five times faster. He calls it the Stairmonster, and after being tested at over 500 stairs per minute that name is quite fitting. It’s got a nice interface for choosing an exercise program and recording data from his routines. It uses an AT89C51RD2 along with a quadrature decoder and a heart rate monitor module that talks to a chest strap worn during each session. A 320×240 touchscreen gives feedback on the routine, which is altered to achieve targeted heat rates for optimum results. Nice job [Eric]!