Calories Out... For A Change

I know this post isn't technically about food...

 In order to assuage the guilt of snarfing things like those cupcakes, as well as in the interests of avoiding an expanding girth, some form of caloric output seemed necessary. To this end; a recent dumpster-dive yielded a couple of stationary bikes, minus their control electronics.

Just add two nrrds, a couple of Arduino microcontroller boards, and an assortment of other parts... and the result for one bike can be seen coming together below. Note that the UNO board shown is a Chinese knock-off that was given to me last year, that uses a CH340 (pdf datasheet here) USB interface chip. You might enjoy the real thing better, if you're considering one for any projects. Please see the Arduino link above.

The switches are OBSN series Sanwa Denshi arcade buttons, for that bit of nostalgic feel. The knob on the right varies the display contrast to accommodate differing user positions on the bike. They're run through a MC14490 debouncer on the little board in the bottom left, to clean up the electrical noise during button presses, mostly because:
  1. I'm not sufficiently motivated to code the debounce in software
  2. I have a whole tube of them I got for dirt cheap at an auction
  3. they work really well
  4. I have exactly six switches and they're six-channel debouncers



In this prototype stage, what with an LCD display and lots of colourful wires, it's definitely not the kind of thing you wave in the air in public; especially if you live in the US. Once I'm happy with the signal routing I'll probably clean it up by committing to a purple circuit board from the nice folks at OSH Park.

This 2nd pic shows it mounted on the stem/neck tube of the bike. Cleaning up the mess of wiring inside the bike carcass continues...



Soon I'll be able to watch stuff like Scandinavian homicide drama on Netflix while burning calories!

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