Ghetto Smart Treadmill

 

Video Demo>>>>

Transform any manual treadmill into a smart fitness device compatible with Peloton, Zwift, Strava, Kinomap and other fitness apps using a microcontroller and a simple ir sensor.

 

This is my ghetto treadmill, it cost me maybe £49.95 in the returned item sale. It doesn't do any interactivity with any of the latest fitness apps. It just has stop start button, speed adjustment. It doesn't do any auto speed/incline adjustment during classes like the £3499 Peloton Tread Machines (https://www.onepeloton.com/en-GB/shop/tread) do but I figure i can adjust speed with the button. Perhaps I will work on this feature later on. For heartrate monitoring I use a cheap £10 bluetooth heart monitor chest strap from ebay/ali.

 

 

I Have an old ipad 6th gen and a free peloton 30-day trial, so what better way to improve my ghetto-tread than to implement some treadmill metrics and send them to the ipad app. I saw online there is an adapter called a 'runn' (https://npe.fit/products/runn) which attaches to the treadmill and provides app metrics but it costs £77 (+P&P) and that is more than my whole sub-£50 treadmill cost so no thanks.

I decided to create my own adapter using parts i already have in a box at home, I think the parts are cheap though, coming in at under £10 for the whole lot on Ali. I designed and 3d printed the case.

Here is a gif of the peloton app on ios/ipad and the metrics data is displayed at the lower half of the screen. Interestingly, the peloton app does not display metric data if in landscape mode which is unfortunate as most people balance their tablets in that orientation, perhaps it is peloton's cheeky dig at you to buy a whole peloton tread yo.

 Here is a gif of how the wireless sensor functions. there is a small piece of aluminium foil tape (or anything moderately reflective for the ir led to bounce off) on the treadmill which registers everytime it passes the sensor, with this it is possible to calculate speed, and from this we can calculate other metrics too with some simple maths. At present, I am using static incline measurement but in future there is no reason why I cannot implement active incline using an imu, it's very simple to do.

 

Features

• ✅ Real-time Speed & Distance Tracking using hall effect sensor
• ✅ OLED Display showing live metrics (speed, distance, calories, incline, time)
• ✅ Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) broadcasting via Fitness Machine Service (FTMS)
• ✅ Peloton App Compatible - Full support for iOS/Android in portrait and landscape modes
• ✅ Live Metrics During Workout - Speed, pace, distance, incline, elevation gain, calories
• ✅ Complete Post-Workout Summary - Charts and graphs for all metrics
• ✅ Zwift Compatible - Works with any FTMS-compatible fitness app
• ✅ Standalone Operation - Works without app connection, displays metrics on OLED
• ✅ Battery monitoring showing remaining charge percentage

 For more project info visit here

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