“Cardio-workout is boring, particularly so, when exercising indoors. Several existing projects try to alleviate this by doing cool stuff such as coupling the ergometer to a game console, or even simulating a real bicycle ride in VR. Exciting as these are, technically, they don’t really help much: Workout is still boring. So, instead, I’d like to be able to just read a book or watch TV while training. But then it’s difficult to keep up a steady pace.
The idea, here, is to focus on the latter problem, and provide straight-forward feedback, on whether your current level of training is good enough, or you should put in some more effort. However, the “good enough” level will vary not only per person, but also over time (long term, as you get better, but also within a training session: for instance, it’s near impossible to go at full speed before you’ve warmed up). Therefore, the idea behind this project is simply to record a) the previous run and b) the best run (aka highscore), and then provide direct feedback on how you are currently faring compared to those runs.
If that sounds a bit abstract, skip over to Step 7 for details on what the completed display will show.
A further goal of this project is to keep things really simple and cheap. Depending on where you order your parts, you can complete this project for around $5 (or about 30$ when ordering from premium domestic sellers), and if you have played with the Arduino environment, before, there is a fairly good chance that you already have most or all of the parts you need.”