The Xiaomi Treadmill and the Apple Watch in Home Assistant – a good starting point for a new and contemporary open source sports sensor platfrom?

Last Updated on November 10, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Discussion in the Home Assistant community:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/xiaomi-treadmill-walkingpad-integration/204713

Great work Marke,

I recently studied how to calibrate a threadmill. fellnr is an expert for this:

https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Treadmill_Calibration

But if we calibrate a treadmill should we not calibrate a Xiaomi Treadmill, one of view treadmills that offers electronic speed read out and contol of motor speed in Python?

The problem with threse treadmills is that they are usually very incaccurate what they indicate for speed. There are treadmill speed sensors availabe as the NPE Runn Treadmill Smart Sensor. But these sensors ususually only can be connected to sports watches and bike computers. But how to get access to these data in Python?

There is Balena Health which supports the Polar H10. But as far as I know it is possible to modify it for instance for treadmill speed sensors which use the foot pod profile…

We can connect a Raspberry Pi running Balena Health to a Raspberry Pi running Balena Home Assistant and connect those over the Balena cloud to get our threadmill speed sensor data in Home Assistant. A very compliated pathway.

Now we have Marke Hallowell who started an integration for the Xiaomo Treadmill which is great. Sports sensor companies make it difficult to acess sports sensor data. I have studied this topic intensely. One of the best sports sensors which can be used with Home Assistant is the Apple Watch:

https://smart-live.net/apple-health-daten-in-home-assistant-visualisieren/

And now Marke HallowellI started an integration for Xiaomi Treadmill/WalkingPad Integration. For sports sensors we have for instance the Adafruit Pyloton Open Source Bike Computer, then we have Balena Health, we have also Retö Röllins Raspberry Ant+ which sends sports sensor data to an MQTT brocker, Fenix 5 which sends sports senso data over an eventhub app to Azure cloud Power Bi. But who uses Microsoft Power Bi and who wants the Garmin heart rate there?

It would be highly desirable to have all these sports sensor data in Home Assistant and not only in Garmin Connect where we cannot do anything with those. The Apple watch and Xiaomi Treadmill/WalkingPad Integration are good starting point for such a project in which I am very interested in.

I am an expert how to access sport sensor data altough I never wanted to be one. But I have become one since it is so difficult to access those. And I have studied those intensely and there are many different projects. But my conclusion is to have those all in a modern platform such as Home Assistant would be a milestone for people who want to do something which their sports sensor data and not only look at those in Garmin connect.