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mark :: blog
A few years ago I automated the treadmill in our guest room as a way of motivating
Tracy and I to keep fit. The treadmill sent us emails when we used it, and the
touch panels around the house showed how much we'd used it in the last week and
month. This worked really well for some time; until the point we realised if we both
agreed to stop using it on the same day then there would be no competition, no winner, no loser,
and neither us would feel bad.
Last winter the Red Hat video team came to my house to record some footage for both
internal and external use. On one of the internal videos they look at my home
automation system, point the camera at a wall tablet, and figure out that I'd not
used my treadmill in over two years. So there were really two options (1) remove the
year from the display so it would never look like we were slacking for more than
a year, or (2) find a way to get motivated again.
Recently we both started using Twitter, so it seemed like a natural progression to
hook the treadmill to twitter and have it publicly embarrass us for slacking
off.
So the treadmill now has it's own twitter page.
We called it 'twedmill' ('tweadmill' perhaps is more correct, but just sounds like a
factory that weaves twead jackets).
Here is how it works:
The treadmill itself is pretty standard; it's from Trimline and has a fancy
computer. When I looked inside and saw a PIC I was tempted to interface direct
to the computer, but didn't really have the time to get around to that.
Although the treadmill does things like have a variable incline and measurement of heart
rate, all I really care about it making sure we were using it, for how long,
and how far we got.
Under a cover in the base are the PWM controllers, motors, and the belt
drive to the treadmill deck. The treadmill itself measures the belt speed
by having a single magnet on the wheel and a small sensor next to it, one
revolution giving one pulse. So to keep things simple I just hot-glued a
spare reed switch I had around so the same magnet would trigger it. The reed
switch happily copes with the treadmill even on top speed, so no real need
for anything more fancy.
I didn't have anything that could accurately measure the diameter of the roller, so
by counting pulses at various speeds and comparing to the onboard
display it worked out at 8122 pulses/revolutions per (uk) mile (so that's
about 198mm of travel per pulse, making the diameter of the
roller about 63mm).
I use a 1-wire network in the house to measure temperatures, watch the doorbell,
and control the central heating system, so I wanted to use the same system
to deal with the treadmill. So the reed switch connects to a DS2423
counter (Unfortunately it seems the DS2423 is discontinued now). The DS2423 was
only available in a surface-mount package, so I found some converters on ebay
to save having to design a PCB just for three components. The
DS2423 connects into a 1-wire hub in node0, then to a 1-wire USB adapter on our main
server, currently running Fedora 10.
The software used in based on the source code from 'digitemp'
as it includes
code in cnt1d.c to read the counter values. Every ten
seconds the jabber treadmill bot switches to the right network segment
on the 1-wire hub then polls the counter of the DS2423 to see
if the treadmill has moved. Once the treadmill has stopped moving for
a while the software stores the total distance travelled and time in
a database, sends an email, and uses the perl Net::Twitter module to
post a mesage to twitter. (It can also draw a graph showing speed over
time, but that turned out to be not very interesting)
For the future I'd quite like to hook directly into the
treadmill computer, perhaps giving two way control of the treadmill programs, as
well as recording the incline and heart rate. Another idea has been to use the
current treadmill speed to decide which music video to play next based on bpm (the tv is
connected to an old XBOX running XMBC so could easilly be remotely controlled to
switch videos). Or perhaps link it to google streets for a virtual jog through
some random town. Finally, you currently have to select who is using the
treadmill before (or very quickly after) using it using the touch panels in the
house; which seems like a good excuse to play with some RFID in our shoes, perhaps
also using that to select a playlist of music videos per person.
Created: 14 Jun 2009
Tagged as: fedora, ha, hafeature
2 comments
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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my
thoughts and opinions on my security
work, open source, fedora, home automation,
and other topics.
pics from my twitter:
popular tags:
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trips
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If you *really* want to use this treadmill, don't run on it; walk on it. And put a desk on it. Seriously. I just got my own new treadmill, and I walk 4-6 hours a day on it when I'm home, at the moderate pace of 2 miles an hour, working the whole time. That's a solid average of ten miles a day. And then your treadmill won't be able embarrass you; it will publicly sing your praises. ;)