Blog ≫ 2019 ≫ Got the treadmill and already started "improving" it...
Collected the treadmill yesterday from Mersham in the end, near Ashford but much nearer to work. Was a bit rural and slightly tricky to find but phone sat nav worked nicely, even alerting me to a delay near work and re-routing me. When I got the the seller said "You've not brought a car? It's not going in that!". He measured up and said no way, it looked about 5cm short to me so I though it worth a go and could drive home with the boot open if not. It was HELLA heavy and quite hard to move, it's a big old beast, looks like this1 but we got it into the car eventually. With the drivers seat pushed forward a notch I could shut the boot, so all good.
Clare and I struggled even more to get it out of the car and into the house, but we managed, with only two small scratches to the wooden floor... It's in place now, hopefully you can see a picture below (with exercise bike and weights artfully posed by Clare), though we need a bit of a rearrange. I think I would like more space behind the treadmill, in case I fall off the back, so may turn it ninety degrees. Then I'd like to put a screen up in front of it too, move our bedroom TV that we don't use.
I'm already hacking on it! Sort of! It doesn't have any outputs, but it does have a aux (headphone type plug) input, so I've taken a raspberry pi with music player and plugged that in. It's the pi that already has the infra red input and display that I was using in the kitchen so we can use an old remote control to control the music. Also as long as I tell my fitbit "I'm on the treadmill" it will log my stats, and post a little 🐹 to slack and to this blog (a hamster, like I'm on a hamster wheel, see?). Plenty more to do, I can;
- use the bluetooth on the raspberry pi to try and detect who is really on the treadmill, Clare or me
- add a removable desk to the treadmill, so I can walk and work
- use the remote control to start a run?
- have that raspberry pi post exercise updates when it boots up?
- add a camera to that pi to take a pictue of the treadmill screen like my old laundrino washing machine hack
- some other kind of physical connection to log exercise when we start using it?
- have it take a picture of me after exercising (not going to be popular)
so many options...
I already did an hour on the treadmill this morning. Have had a few problems with blog updating (I think stemming from when I tried to use unicode in page urls) but should be updating again now so we may well see the little hamster icon elsewhere on this page.
Clare is back from the gym now, time to stop. They are going out this afternoon to see Jen's new dog, so I have a couple of hours to work on one of the above then...
- Removed old amzn.to/2UjLQKQ link here.
raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.