Smart exercise bike computer. Part #1: Preludium

Good day!

During last 3 years I have been spending approximately 2 hours a day doing sports: I have been riding my exercise bike. Over these years I created my own sport-program for exercise bike. This program seems to be quite complicate since you need to do a lot of calculations when you ride. But soon it will not be a problem because I have a good idea which I intend to implement in this project! I want to create my own special computer for exercise bike which will execute my control program comfortably for everybody who wants.

Element 14 is going to provide me with a  FRDM-KW41ZFRDM-KW41Z for this project and that’s good I have used FRDM family in my previous] project so I have some experience about it.

In this project I have a plan Minimum and a plan Maximum. Let me show you those plans.

Plan Minimum

My system will contain next parts:

• Main block (with my FRDM board, power supply and some IOs).
• Speed sensor for bike (encoder for example).
• Dashboard (contains Android smartphone with bluetooth interface).

My system will provide next functions:

• True calculation of speed and distance.
• True calculation of calories consumed.
• My own sport-program parameters calculator to take a best effect of riding.
• Transfering and displaying all data to special smartphone application.

Plan Maximum

My system will contain next parts:

• All parts from plan Minimum.
• Large set of sensors (contains encoder, tension sensor and pulse sensor).
• Headphones (bluetooth).
• Wireless charger for smartphone.
• Electrical generator for main block and wireless charger.
• Special PC program (to analyze my progress in sport).

My system will provide next functions:

• All functions of plan Minimum.
• Auto start/stop feature for smartphone music player.
• Smartphone and main block wireless powering (by human-power).
• Intelligent analyze of my progress using a special PC program.

Bonus

I plan to tell you a story about how I came to trainings on an exercise bike: why I started training and what I achieved in these three years, and also describe in detail my program of training without which the development of this project would not make sense.

Conclusion

Next week I plan to start solving the first technical issues related to my exercise bike, and in conclusion of today's post I want to say the following: an exercise bike is my hobby, and electronics and programming are my profession. I'm doing this project as part of my hobby, so do not expect a truly "professional" approach from it, I just want to enjoy the process and hope you will enjoy reading my blogs!

If you have any questions after reading this post, do not hesitate and ask them in the comments!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day!