My exercise bike broke today, well not mechanically, the circuit board is toast, I have no clue why. Well, because I am so very excited about working out everyday, I am really bummed. [And if you believe that I have a nice tropical paradise in Antarctica to sell you.]
So I do want to exercise more, but at the moment I cannot increase or decrease the tension on the bike, Nor can I get the RPMs or anything like that. There is a solution though.
- I could buy another Junky "Console" from sears and replace the old one for $169.99
- I can make a small circuit with a microcontroller, low power motor driver, and a character LCD display for under $50, and Have fun while doing it.
Well guess what I am doing. The beginning details follow.
I took apart the console... Oh the horror... There were messy wire harnesses everywhere all with the wires directly soldered to the circuit board then plastered with RTV to keep the wires from snapping. Oh well easily taken care of screwdrivers and pliers work wonders.
After about a half an hour I had the circuit board exhumed from the plastic shell. Here are the front and back pictures.
After that I took off the side panel to get to the tensioning motor… I had to do that once before darn Flywheel Bearings. I then tested the motor with a 6v power supply to see if it could handle it. [After testing I then noticed the label on the top that said 6v Tension motor… darn could have saved some time]. For positioning information it uses a potentiometer… well at least what looks to be a potentiometer, It has 3 pins and seems to connect to some sort of voltage sensing circuit on the circuit board. I couldn’t confirm it because my multimeter is at work at the current point in time.The RPM sensing is done by a magnetic proximity sensor that senses the rotations of the pedals which can easily be counted by microcontroller.
Another edition in the bike controller resurrection design will come soon.
