If walking at a treadmill desk seems a little too boring or repetitive, you can try hacking the treadmill to scroll through web pages for more interestging viewing.
Brian Peiris realised that he could run his treadmill’s sensor through an Arduino with little difficulty. From there, just a few lines of Python helped interpret the spinning of the belt as mouse wheel movements, effectively turning the treadmill into a giant page scroller. If you love the idea of getting exercise at your desk, nothing will motivate you better than using the treadmill to scroll through Wikipedia.
If you’re feeling particularly daring, Brian also includes a tutorial to throttle your download speeds based on how quickly you walk, as you can see in the video above. Want to download a new game? Better start running. Check out the source link for more details.
Using a manual treadmill to scroll a web page and more [brian.peiris.name via Hack A Day]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.