Out of curiosity, I’ve studied the inner working of my home-trainer. Without dismantling the bike, or disabling the functionality of the bike, I have succesfully connected the home-trainer to my Macbook, and can now calculate the cycling speed on my computer.

The home-trainer has a computer with a screen that displays all the information. This computer has two sensors connected to it: A heart rate sensor and a flywheel sensor. The flywheel sensor has a 3.5mm jack plug, which gave me the idea to connect it to the line-input on my soundcard (because a line input is nothing more than a A/D converter). This way it was not necessary to solder, or to create an interface.

After starting the audio recording, it struck me immediately that with every stroke of the pedals a small pulse was visible. Based on this I could calculate the distance for each stroke that is made, then I ultimately calculated the speed of the hometrainer on my computer.

Perhaps I will come around to make a GUI for my home-trainer, so I can automatically tweet the results of my workouts. Small detail: Java Sound is a really hard study. A quote I found:

There is no getPitch() method. You need to implement a spectrum analyzer for this. You might find a library online somewhere OR you can go to college, get an engineering degree, learn some DSP and still just throw your hands up in frustration and copy the implementation from a book