Hook up your exercise bike to Google Maps and turn your boring stationary bike into a virtual reality excursion.
Tags:Connect Your Exercise Bike to Google Maps,exercising with googlemaps,google maps hack,how to create a google maps exercise bike,keypad hack tips,tinkernut,usb keypad hack
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Transcript
Male Speaker: Using a stationary bike can be healthy but very boring. So in this video I'm going to show you how to spice it up a little bit using Google maps and a couple other components.
Tinkernut.
Parts list.
Male speaker: To do this project you are going to need to gather a few parts, first you will need a USB keypad that has arrow keys, next you will need a magnetic window or door alarm and you will need to make sure that it has wires, instead of wireless. Then you will need some soldering equipment and lastly you will need an exercise bike and a Laptop. The premise behind how this works is pretty simple, the magnetic alarm runs off a read switch that connects every time a magnet is nearing. So if we connect the switch to the up arrow key on the keypad then every time a magnet passes by the switch will connect and the button will be pressed.
To begin open up the keypad until you see the circuit boards that comprise it, find which circuits connect a trigger the up arrow key or key 8. Then connect the wires to it, since there are a thousand different keypads available on the market, yours will not look exactly like mine. But in my case I was able to find that circuits 4 and 3 connected when the up arrow key was pressed.
So I trace those back to the main logic board and solder the alarm wires to them. Once you have the wires connected to the button put everything back together you may need to cut some of the plastic casing in order to accommodate the extra wires that we add it. Now plug the USB keypad into your computer and open up maps.google.com and make it full screen. Then you will need to hit the num lock key on the keypad to turn off the number lock. Now whenever you pass a magnet by the alarm switch the map should move forward. After you have it working properly you want to attach the rig to an exercise bike, I duck tape the alarm switch to the front bike wheel and the magnet to the bike pedal. This is so that every time the pedal makes rotation it will trigger the alarm switch, then run the wires up to the Laptop which should be placed somewhere in front of the bike. Now just top on the bike and start pedaling and enjoy the scenery.
If you want more information on this project, please visit the website that provided the inspiration for this video. Be sure to check out tinkernut.com on Facebook and Twitter. All right that's it for this tutorial for more go to tinkernut.com
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