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
Been bored for a while so been making this red dot augmented optic.
And yes thats the M314 Motion Tracker in Aliens. But mostly I made it to wonder how cool it would be if each colonial marine each had their own pulse rifle mounted motion tracker optic, instead of that big clunky handheld thing.
Following on from this, I adapted the red dot to have a button to change screens.
There is an assisted targeting system, A team tracker to locate your comrades, a guided turn by turn satnav to guide your troops towards it's destination (there's nothing worse than getting lost in a fire firefight), A team telemetry data screen showing each of your platoon's status & any messages from them or base command (or your Mom telling you dinner's on the table)
It all comes from my initial experiments with transparent oled screens. Here is my initial experiment with a clip-on scope targeting adapter.
And here is a smart glasses experiment for turn by turn directions, messaging, sms, weather, time. Then I got into 3D rendering of a cube, helix, and molecule.
It's winter here now, and it's time to be spending quality time indoors and I like to make creative ideas like this when I have time. If you like you can follow my project as it is updated here on github.
Thanks for Reading and
"I Say We Take Off, And Nuke The Site From Orbit. It's The Only Way To Be Sure!" :)
EZ-TRAK is a comprehensive satellite tracking suite designed for amateur
radio operators, weather satellite enthusiasts, and educational
purposes. The software interfaces with an EZ-TRAK BLE device which is
mounted to a lightweight foldable portable satellite dish antenna to
hand track satellites in real-time, providing azimuth and elevation data
for optimal antenna positioning.
It has been an enjoyable few years experimenting with fabric antennas and i'm happy to have been featured on Tech Minds youtube channel this week. I feel very lucky to have this attention from the amsat crowd and I am indeed an amateur just like everyone in the hobby. Making things has always been something which I have delved into to help me learn about things which I find interesting, I come from a tech background, something which I have studied too at university level, my early childhood learning was surrounded by artists, painters & sculptors. Making things with my hands has always been there along the way. I think it was around 2010 when I built my own 3d printer, and in 2016 I built my own cnc router and along with this I learned how to use cad design software to help me come up with answers to ideas in my head; I think it is this early art exposure which made me see the world a bit differently, to look around, to read articles, to hear stories. It was in 2019 when I was sitting thinking about alternatives to aluminium mosquito screen door mesh for antenna building as I felt it was unsuitable due to it not collapsing thus cancelling out portability, being sharp with splinters once cut and trimmed, and only being semi rigid. I was sat one day thinking about alternatives and saw something called RFID Blocking fabric and having not seen it being used in any antenna designs before, my mind considered if it was not just blocking but reflective of radiowaves so I gave it a try and was stunned by it's performance and potential, I knew it was right for me, my discovery was made which led me to my invention which is starting to lead to other amateurs coming up with their own ideas. I might sometimes interpret things in a way which may or may not be on the path of normality. However I learned that it is my interpretation and in art how can that be wrong but for other people to decide.
I have had the pleasure of having buyers of my ideas as varied as aerospace engineers, corporate aerospace seniors, prop departments, youtubers, even hollywood film studios, Sony Pictures, Shinfield, Culver City, Hamburg prop companies, Raytheon, Boeing, Bletchley, King Saud University, and so on, this past few years of fabric exploration.
My designs are forever being adjusted, and my iterations change as I go along. I have experimented with glass fiber poles, aluminium mosquito door mesh, real rain umbrellas, beach balls, lots and lots of different designs. I experimented at the beginning with true parabolic designs, and indeed i still do. But the one design I believe true to myself is the design I sell right now. It is a compromise on manufacturing. As I live in a small humble flat with a cramped backyard shed I use the tools and parts that I have available and I build things to mass produce according to the time I feel I can put into making them and I judge the price by a few rules, postage price, ebay sales cut percentage, international fees, parts purchasing, my time, what i feel it is worth, packaging time, packaging supplies, tools and sundries. That is the way of iphones, cars, sneakers, farming, basic economics. I am not blind to the path I choose in my design, and in my backyard shed I have other designs which I do not sell due to the costs of the list above being too great to do repeatedly, so I choose to release the things I make as a reflection of what I have available. There has been no crowdfunding sought, no wish to deceive, no investment from banks or private investors to help me with machinery or workspace, nor do I have any access to the old university research cash fund. I do what I do in the best way I do. Doo Bee doo doo.
As a further update to my umbrella designs I wish to help the amsat community who have not used one of these antennas, or a fabric antenna, but have attempted to decide that the antenna is a flat circle, or that it is not parabolic in any sense. Some adjectives describing it have been rather well suspicious and I do have knowledge of pernicious activity going on but I have better things to do than wander down that path.
Anyway, here are a few photos of my backyard shed antennas in my backyard shed being made and I present them with a flat bamboo cane sat across horizontally to help show just what shape it is.
And you will find if you want to be more exact about the design it would likely be described as a truncated cone, or conical frustum. And according to antenna design perfectly capable :)
As per the idea that this is flat, shallow or unsuitable I pledge to differ about that, afterall a parabola is in fact just a conic section of a cone and by that definition the parabola owes much to the cone.
Compared to my 1.2m offset dish:
And as per lacking suitable gain, I ask that you read my previous post which has images showing screenshots of it in use and both the swr (db) and peak swr (db) which was actually better than my early parabola design. One of the reasons I chose to add parabolic in the title of the ebay listing is precisely because of that, an ebay listing will only attract buyers who search for certain keywords and by adding the word it will hopefully reach more prospective buyers.
Thanks for reading and who knows if the fabric cone shall become a parabola again (or if it is necessary as I already explored) :)
Also here is an early parabola design iteration with bendy fiberglass poles and sure looks fancy futuristic cad prints but takes a hella time. Feel free to read my past posts for more on that.
Here's a Video of Metop capture process using the fabric folding parabolic antenna, really great signal and locks on for a big pass. It is much easier to capture images than using a traditional big old metal satellite dish which is heavy and difficult to maneuver, witht the fabric parabolic antenna my arm does not ache and I am able to focus more on directional accuracy and also the phone screen giving signal strength feedback:
Hi there, just a short post for some images I have captured using my Fabric Antenna. So far I have had success with: Inmarsat 1.5Ghz Meteor HRPT NOAA HRPT METOP AHRPT S-Band HRPT X-Band QO100 S-Band QO100
I have some other success with other satellites (Globalsat etc) which I don't feel I am ready to share just yet. Anyway here is my antenna invention, i'm very proud of it, and it's great seeing all the diverse supporters who have bought one from me & seeing other people figure out new ways to use conductive fabric for antenna creations.
Here are the images
1) NOAA HRPT (tree cover in my area affects the most northern orbit)
2) METEOR HRPT (Overall a nice big capture all the way down to africa and the Azores in the Atlantic)
3) METOP AHRPT (Capturing & processing this big Metop 6Mbps file using just my mobile phone was so pleasing to see it all work out who knew phones could process like a desktop)
Why develop a space pen when a pencil will do? Thanks for reading.
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