Forced exercise automation

[lotharj]

All this shelter in place (and being shackled continuously during most of it) is starting to make me a little out of shape. I know there are a few DIY folks here and was wondering if anyone could share some thoughts or experience with forced exercise.

I have a stationary exercise bike that I'm thinking of adding an Arduino to. The Arduino would be monitoring a magnetic reed sensor (would it be responsive /fast enough?) and controlling an open pill bottle attached to a simple motor.

The idea would be to hang the motor/pill bottle to the ceiling out of reach, with a key in it attached to a string so that it will fall within reach. I would then chain my ankles and wrists to the bike. When so many revolutions are achieved, the Arduino would turn on the motor, thus tipping the bottle over and allowing me access to release from the bike.

Two fail-safes would be: 1 a long running timer on the Arduino that would tip the bottle regardless after so many hours. 2 a string from the handle bar leading to another pill bottle that contained both another key and filled with used motor oil. Oil would ruin the carpet on the floor if used.

Thoughts?

[rmcingle]

Certainly doable.

Magnetic reed switches will work just fine. That is the mechanism that bicycle odometers use. In fact, an easy and fairly inexpensive way of getting the switch and magnet would be to buy a cheap bicycle odometer and use its switch.

I think that I would spice it up a bit. Instead of a pill bottle that would get dumped I would have a shaft that the string was wound around. If you are pedaling at a certain rate, the motor would rotate the shaft one turn every so often. If you slacked off and dropped your speed too low it could rotate the shaft the opposite direction. The idea is that you would have to exert yourself for a certain length of time.

For a failsafe, you could have the motor/shaft/key attached to the ceiling by a rope through an eyebolt. The rope comes down to a bucket where it ties to a cord that has an anchor embedded in a block of ice. When the ice melts (hours) the anchor pulls free and the entire mechanism drops. Put a knot in the rope so that the entire mess ends up at the right height instead of out of reach on the floor.

Ron

[Anwendungsfehler]

All this shelter in place (and being shackled continuously during most of it) is starting to make me a little out of shape. I know there are a few DIY folks here and was wondering if anyone could share some thoughts or experience with forced exercise.

I have a stationary exercise bike that I'm thinking of adding an Arduino to. The Arduino would be monitoring a magnetic reed sensor (would it be responsive /fast enough?) and controlling an open pill bottle attached to a simple motor.

The idea would be to hang the motor/pill bottle to the ceiling out of reach, with a key in it attached to a string so that it will fall within reach. I would then chain my ankles and wrists to the bike. When so many revolutions are achieved, the Arduino would turn on the motor, thus tipping the bottle over and allowing me access to release from the bike.

Two fail-safes would be: 1 a long running timer on the Arduino that would tip the bottle regardless after so many hours. 2 a string from the handle bar leading to another pill bottle that contained both another key and filled with used motor oil. Oil would ruin the carpet on the floor if used.

Thoughts?

Don't forget to include an ups, just in case you have any sort of power loss, they're about 100-200 Euros, including a watchdog interface you can attach to your arduino. Additionally you can fire up an emergency light while the main power source is down, very helpful in dark rooms. Or you're using a 2nd method, combined with an e-magnet, which releases a 2nd key in such a situation. All our self bondage equipment (I prefer Arduinos over RPIs, no boot media needed) are triple secured and while starting up, all locking servos are set to an open position when running the setup function ...

Cheers,
A.