Exercise Buddy Provides Workout Motivation
Adafruit's Bluetooth device straps onto an exercise bike and pauses media when you're not moving!
February is here, which means the exercise routine started on January first may be waning or nonexistent. But there is still time to reach your 2022 goals! If you need an assist to get you of the couch and onto a stationary bike then the Exercise Buddy motion-aware BLE media controller from Adafruit could be just the thing. If you stop exercising, it simply pauses the media on your Apple device.
While the Exercise Buddy isn't an off-the-shelf device per se, Adafruit’s LED Glasses driver — which also works as a general purpose nRF2840 sensor board — combines all the electronics in a nice ready-made package. This includes an LIS3DH accelerometer to detect movement and charging capabilities. You’ll need to pop on a LiPo battery pack, 3D-print housing parts, strap it on to your bike’s crank arm with Velcro.
Programming is via CircuitPython, and as such, it can be modified by copy/editing the appropriate file. You can change the WIGGLE_ROOM value around to provide some compensation for jitter, and there’s also a WAIT value that could be modified. With a few tweaks, the device could even be adapted to track non-bicycle forms of exercise.
One last note: if you’re thinking you can just press “play” to take a break and still watch your show, think again! It deviously keeps sending the pause command until you start the movement back up.
