we've identified a problem with pretty much every desk on the market the
traditional sitting desk has all kinds of ergonomic and posture challenges and
of course encourages a more uh sedentary lifestyle and then there's the
new age standing desk well with the
standing desk you know you stand and there are a lot of claims being made
about how these might help offset the uh
gigantic cake that you're apparently eating for lunch and making matters
worse these standing desks are inordinately expensive in many cases
so we thought leave it to us we've got the solution
for less than a couple hundred bucks we're gonna build the desk that forces
you to stay in shape
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more so you want a desk that keeps you fit
where do you start well there are actually commercially available
treadmill desks but they are freaking expensive so we set out to make
something a bit more economical now given that many maybe even most
people should probably have a bike lying around and if they don't you can get one
for pretty cheap on craigslist we figured that seemed like a good place to
start but how could we make sure that the user
actually pedaled on it and didn't just sit on the bike seat feeling like they
were exercising could we maybe generate the power for
the computer using the bike well that seemed a bit harsh but what if
we took away their internet whenever they stopped pedaling
now we're getting somewhere so we set about creating a small
generator from a bike that could be used to power the user's internet switch
after ordering a bike fitness trainer an electric motor and a charge controller
from amazon we were ready to get started now you might think that we should put
the electric motor directly onto the flywheel of the fitness trainer but we
need the motor to be spinning at around 3000 RPM and we're not going to be
hitting anywhere near that on the bike so we need to create a gear reduction
from the bike to about two and a half
two inches something like that so the plan was to use a v-belt attached
to the tire and then onto one of these pulleys which came in from amazon and
the bore diameter is just totally wrong and will not fit onto here so now we're
just going to kind of raw dog it and see what happens
the flywheel was removed from the fitness trainer and the tire was removed
from the rim allowing the belt to sit directly on the rim
the tires needed to come off alex's bike anyway after he ran over some beer
bottles that someone kindly smashed on the road so that worked out great for
everyone so the plan since
our die cast pulleys aren't going to work
or to laser cut out pieces of wood
have one that fits over this sprocket and have a couple
that go along the shaft here and sort of
screw them all together and hopefully can transmit the torque after a little
bit of cad we were ready to fire the laser
fire the laser
look if we can just transmit the torque with this it's going to be like done
tomorrow like on a scale of one two absolutely
horrendous where would you rate this idea
somewhere
okay i'll take that
do you think that we just got someone to sort of hold this and then we pedaled we
could just see if it's going to work
with the wooden pulley attached and screwed together
we were actually we weren't that hopeful at this point
so that's got a bit of stickiness
i don't even think this is going to work with wood all right fits in the groove pretty well
yeah we'll just call friction part of the exercise experience with very little
to lose we geared up to see if this plan could work at all
we would need to make sure that we could have the motor spinning at over 3000 RPM
without the poor wooden pulley blowing to pieces
looking go so we're getting like 27 volts something like that
so clearly we need this to be mounted better than just me holding it but
after proving that at least in theory this should work we needed to make a
more permanent mount for the motor so we need to lift the motor up about this
high so that the belt doesn't hit on the frame here
i'm kind of thinking that we might be best off making a frame so we sort of
put two here and then
one across and that's where the motor actually mounts it would be nice to if there's
some way for us to tighten it do you have any ideas
this is not how you're supposed to use these tools
oh that's kind of sketchy no that just
came right out editors note that one didn't happen
you know i just realized this is a dirty prototype why did i even bother drilling
four holes
so that's a problem
yeah we need to sandbag that for sure the electric motor will be connected to
this solar charge controller which will take the constantly changing voltage out
of the motor and output a nice clean 12
volts from here it will go to this 12
volt inverter which will turn the 12 volts into 120 volt ac so that you could
plug any device into it like a normal outlet
we weren't entirely sure if this would work since
you might need a battery between the controller and inverter
on there
i wonder if this will work
actually it kind of looks like that i just forgot to put the nut on
oh so if i start pedaling
can you press the button that's on that nothing
yeah we must need a battery in there darn fitness pc
we grab dead because he's over here taking candy
the candy that's upstairs
for it to actually work we need this battery here between the solar charger
and the inverter and that basically just allows the solar
charger to actually turn on and then it does its thing so add start pedaling
so when this light's blinking slowly that means that we're actually getting
charged into the battery and that means that it's around 24 ish
volts or so now what we need to do is have it so that if ed
stops pedaling this light turns off because right now
it's just staying on until the battery drains which is way too long and it's
not nearly as would you call it draconian as we want
because the idea is to punish the user whenever they stop exercising we needed
to add a relay where the did i put that relay that closes a switch when the user
starts pedaling completing a circuit and sending power from the battery to the
inverter then immediately opens it disconnecting the circuit once the user
stops pedaling with the relay added into the circuit well was time to see if it
works yes
haha and then if i stop
yes i don't want to call it a success but it
is definitely a prototype that works i learned so much about electronics
today with v1 working all that was left was to clean things up a bit so i kind
of want to just laser cut a piece of wood
that'll go sort of around here out for some
sandbags and have perfect mounts for the motor and then on
monday we'll have the thrust bearing arrive for this and we're basically done
just clean up the electronics a bit put it in like a nice box or something just
do we have to make a nice box oh it better be the best the best box i can't
make good boxes though we could laser cut a box and you
basically know how this works now cad
laser and boom we're good to go
except wood is a pain i think it's fine
and different pieces can have slightly different properties so a bit of tlc was
needed here and there it's still looking pretty good it's a four foot job you can
get pretty close
like that works
not bad with the top piece cut we attached some two by fours on the bottom
for support and ed filled in the letters using
permanent marker since we couldn't just leave the electronics lying on the floor we
decided to stash them in a Dan case using double-sided tape and after a
little bit of love everything actually fit in surprisingly
well any holes were closed using acrylic
dammit
wow that actually cut me now are you bleeding like slightly yeah all right
time for first aid and in the end it's not looking half bad if we do say
so ourselves so now that the fitness pc2000 is ready to be set up at an
actual desk well maybe it's time for us to show it
to me so this is
the fitness pc 2000 is that just sharpie marker wow that
actually looks surprisingly good like good for what we would normally do yeah
okay sandbag goes here so basically what we've just got a motor
here with did you make the set of wood why
well we ordered the ones but they came in the wrong size so they didn't fit on
the shaft you give a man a laser laser cutter and
no laser cut anything this outputs like 24 volts 200 watts you
mean yeah 200 watts of basin ac power okay so
200 watts is our maximum output here you
guys probably realize then that if you have a powerful rig that's not enough
for you to actually power up your gaming machine while you game
but any more than that would be quite difficult for most people to
to do just by pedaling anyway so should we evaluate now just how usable this is
i guess yeah so uh you know here what what should i what should i try to do
just you know browse the forum watch some youtube videos
i gotta say it is a little bit harder to type while i'm
you know going ham on the on the exercise bicycle but it's not as bad as
you might think oh look at this a mouth-operated mouse
it's like all these crit what are these tech chips guys doing one thing that is
a little bit tough is you can actually feel the resistance changing sometimes
like it'll it'll almost like it'll let you know
when you need to give her a little bit more
do we know why exactly that is that has to have to do with the battery charging
so what could i do that would make it draw more power should we try to power
the whole the whole thing with it as well yeah let's do it let's do it
okay so here we go powering up the computer
wow so you get like a real physical
feedback for the amount of power that your components are drawing like during boot
up oh like it initialized something there i
felt it oh that is some good resistance we got going here i'm gonna work up a sweat
pretty quick here let's get this demo going you know that's actually not
that bad and it's a constant load now whereas
like the spikes in CPU activity before i could really feel them
you would get absolutely no i fell behind oh
crap okay that relay is really unforgiving
the second generation of this product definitely needs like a phillips hue
that gives you like a reading on your battery or like a capacitor right so if you had
a big fat capacitor and then it was like green when it's full and then would
slowly go to yellow and red that would be cool
you'd probably want to get one of those stupid mice from thermaltake that has
the fan in it they have a keyboard with one too
keep your uh keep your palms from getting too sweaty
and your arms from getting too heavy this might be a little extreme i think
having it plugged into the network switch is good enough
okay should we try and play a
game come on
okay play cs go ah
no no no oh no
just load the map come on just
i just want to play one round okay ct here we go
so CPU is at like 25 and GPU is going up as high as like 80
100. oh almost fall behind for a second there
no i give up
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oh my legs so
if the goal was an exercise bike
that makes you literally get ass wet the
mission [ __ ] accomplished
the fitness pc is a huge success
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