Infinity Bike Virtual Reality Cycling Trainer
If you’re pushing yourself, there’s pain and even boredom involved in any form of exercise. On the other hand, if you’re riding a bike…
If you’re pushing yourself, there’s pain and even boredom involved in any form of exercise. On the other hand, if you’re riding a bike outdoors this can be somewhat mitigated by the changing environment that surrounds you. This type of exercise becomes quite difficult in bad weather, so Alexandre Doucet and Maxime Boudreau decided to make a virtual biking setup that can be built and attached to your bike to be ridden on a trainer for less than $30.
Their system, dubbed the Infinity Bike, consists of a magnet and Hall effect sensor to detect the bike’s speed, along with a potentiometer attached to the handlebars via a timing belt to sense the steering direction. 10 3D-printed parts adapt these sensors to the bike as needed, and an Arduino Nano takes this information and passes it on to the Unity 3D environment running on a computer.
With this information, the computer has all the information it needs to let you ride in an environment displayed on your monitor or television. Code as well as a sample track are available on GitHub, and the necessary 3D-printed components can be found on Thingiverse. While it looks like a great place to start, it’s meant to be but an introduction to what can be done with this setup, demonstrated in the video below.