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Feb 4, 2010 at 9:24pm
Sensor recommendation
I’m looking to hook up some sort of sensor to a treadmill.
I need to know when the treadmill is in motion.
It is a manual treadmill, meaning that there are no electrical components. It’s basically a human-sized, hamster wheel.
How can I tell if someone is actually walking on the treadmill?
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Feb 4, 2010 at 11:43pm
I have never tried this, but maybe a mouse might give you some useable data? plus its cheap :)
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Feb 5, 2010 at 6:29am
I like the mouse idea… :)
You could attach the spinning part to a rotary control of a MIDI controller, but you’d probably break it pretty quickly.
I imagine some sort of Hall Effect sensor would do the trick, whereby you measure how often two elements pass by each other and determine the speed from that, like on a bicycle wheel. Which makes me think… maybe you could hack an old-school bike speedometer to work your magic too.
Curious to hear if you get it rolling. Combine it with a projector and some cool visuals and your workouts might get a lot more interesting.
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Feb 8, 2010 at 7:38pm
I think the Hall Effect sensor might be the way to go. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Thanks for the ideas!
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