A very accurate open source treadmill speed sensor for all kind of applications? – PETER GAMMA (Director & Physiologist), MEDITATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE SWITZERLAND (MRIS)

Last Updated on November 13, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

The fellnr calibration uses a high speed camera and manual measurements in Kinovea:

Is this method not difficult and takes a lot of time?
We haven’t used it to this date.
The fellnr instruction eventually can also be used to build a open source treadmill sensor out of it a the same time.
The fellnr method is one of the best and accurate treadmill calibration methods we know.
But can we not simplify it with other soft- and hardware?
Instead of calibrating a treadmill, can we not build a highly accurate treadmill sensor ourselves?
We still can calibrate our sportswatch with it, if we want to.

There is a Universal treadmill speed sensor based on Raspberry Pi:

It uses next to a Raspberry Pi and an infrared receiver and transmitter.
In the above instruction it sends sensor data over ANT+ to Zwift.
But is it not possible to adapt this instruction and modify it to make out of it a tool for calibrating treadmills and also a treadmill sensor for the application of our choice?
An open source hardware and software treadmill speed sensor which we can use with the data analysis software of our choice, such as Matlab, Python, Home Assistant, etc.
Such a sensor would strongly increase the quality of data which we can receive from a treadmill sensor.
The sensors which are currently available for treadmills only transmit ANT+ or BLE speed, etc. but no sensor raw data for our own specialized analysis.
An open source sensor based on a Raspberry Pi would open the door to other applications.

4 replies on “A very accurate open source treadmill speed sensor for all kind of applications?”