Excercise bike Arduino

Johan writes in –

Imagine this: A 30 something bearded man in shorts with a multi-meter connected to cables out of an exercise bike trying to remain balanced an read the multi-meter at the same time as he is turning the pedals with one foot and listening to a beep from the multi-meter. My wife who did not have to imagine it asked “What are you doing?” and I can tell that my answer “isn’t that obvious” wasn’t really that great. So here it goes, all the details of how and why I hacked my exercise bike.

A while back I bought an Arduino together with the pocket piano shield. That was fun and all and I did create a little hardware synthesiser which you can watch at YouTube. Then recently work had a little workshop with David Cuartielles one of the creators of Arduino, and I got seriously interested in doing more with that Arduino I had at home. I also have an exercise bike that I bought with a little idea of perhaps hooking it up to the internets in some way. This is how I’ve done just that. Reverse engineered the bike’s sensors and logic viahooking up my Arduino and reading it’s sensors.