Project Excite Bike – hook up an exercise bike to an Xbox!

Project Excite Bike acgourley writes…

I hooked up my exercise bike to my xbox. Now burnout is awesome. [Videos and Schematics]… Ok really this article is a technical description of our current ‘excitebike’ prototype – it is not a step by step guide. But! If you really want to make your own, this, in addition to the schematics+source, should be sufficient.

The point of the device is to capture the pedaling speed from an exercise bike and make it control a single button on a gamepad, which in turn can be the ‘gas pedal’ for racing games. We have this working with an xbox 360 gamepad but it can be adapted for other controllers and game systems easily. It would be simple to adapt this to a steering wheel controller, for example.

Using the prototype is surprisingly fun, and remarkable in its ability to make you forget just how hard and long you’re working out. It’s tedious to return to working out just to hit a time or distance threshold when you’re used to more direct pedaling imperatives.