Last Updated on November 22, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
It is a TreadTracker we bought last year on Ricardo Switzerland for 30 USD. We finally got it to work with our Newgen medicals Treadmill. We can pair it to our Fenix 6 and to the a training tracker app from Dr. Ing. Rainer Blind over BLE. ANT+ is unfortunatley not supported.
The advantage of using a training tracker as our data logger is that the app stores speed values in the app in the directory workout and we have acess to these sensor data in the .txt format.
a training tracker allows to enter calibrattion values for the TreadTracker sensor, and also the Fenix 6 allows to enter these values. Treadtracker can be calibrated as described in the following review by Ray by sticking marks onto the treadmill and measure it’s length:
the npe runn treadmill tracker allows automatic calibration and is eventually more accurate than the treadtracker if the first is not calibrated as described above. We have seen that last years several npe runn treadmill sensors where sold on Ricardo Switzerland which is a bit of a suprise since the sensor is quiet new. Is it because it does not fit with all treadmills? We do not either how robust these sensors are if they are used daily, this needs to be tested. And for scientifically accurate data eventually more than one treadmill speed sensor is better.
And if we want we can add a Polar H10 chest strap or even two or three, since the a training tracker app allows logging of multiple sensors in parallel. And if we want to beat Rob ter Horst as far as accuracy is concerned, we can use 3 Polar H10 chest straps simultaneously, similar as cardiologists use 3 channel ECG devices as their gold standard for HR measurements. This does makes sense since 3 devices which measure heart rate data are more reliable than only one or two.
So we can use 3 Polar H10 chest strap simulteneously until we have a 3 channel ECG device which is handy for daily use. OpenBCI could be used for this purpose but OpenBCI usually is not as handy as for instance chest straps are. We need a case and most probably a Raspberry Pi to run OpenBCI GUI on it to connect the OpenBCI modules to it.
The great thing about a training tracker is that we can use also next to our Treadtracker sensor an NPE Runn and a foot pod and log these data simultaneously. This allows data analysis with Dr. Ing. Rainer Blinds a training tracker at a level nobody has ever done before.
So we can have multiple speed sensors which we suppose is more reliable than only one. We can test for instance exactly this topic. But we suppose we sooner or later will have one or several Raspberry Pi treadmill speed sensors which we can connect to the application of our choice:
The Raspberry Pi treadmill speed sensor would be our favorte treadmill speed sensor if it is connected to an open software platform since it is an open source hardware sensor which is our preferred choice.