I'm a pretty serious road cyclist, so I get LOTS of questions about training, and about Peloton in particular, which is weird because serious outdoor riders are not really Peloton's market AT ALL. It's always been for spin people, and spin classes are their own thing entirely.<p>Certainly SOME of my riding pals do spin during the week, but most of them are doing structured workouts using TrainerRoad or TrainingPeaks or Zwift and a smart trainer attached to a real bike. (Mostly, it's their old bike, because cyclists nearly always have more than one bike.)<p>Indoor training for cyclists has, for the last 15 or so years, generally been focused on power targets. You do some fitness tests to determine your maximum hourly wattage, and then your workouts are expressed as a series of X minutes at Y% of your max power, etc.<p>This is tedious if you're using an old-style, fixed-resistance trainer, because you're watching the clock during the intervals and then shifting on the bike to achieve higher or lower levels of resistance in order to hit the right power target at a reasonable cadence. Honestly, this SUCKS.<p>Smart trainers take that out of it by dynamically adjusting the resistance for each segment during the workout, so all you really have to do is keep pedaling at the desired cadence (typically 90-95 rpm); sometimes it's harder, and sometimes it's easier. You don't have to manage anything. It's awesome. (I watch bad movies on the trainer now.)<p>The Peloton, as I understand, doesn't dynamically adjust its resistance. I'm baffled by this, given how home training is for go-fast cyclists, but maybe that's just not a thing spin people want.
I was floored when I realized the Peloton has no games and it's closed to third-party developers. It seems to just have group classes which couldn't be less interesting to me.<p>I'd ask "what were they thinking?" but it apparently sells like hotcakes, so it's me who's out of touch.
Author here. This work actually dates back from August-October of last year for the most part, but I didn't get to finish writing it up till the holidays. Happy to take questions here or on Twitter (see my profile).<p>If anyone is interested in building their own PeloMon, a full BOM is present at the bottom of the third post in the series (<a href="https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardware/" rel="nofollow">https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...</a>), and the GitHub repo (<a href="https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon</a>) has both Fritzing board layout files and the source code for the device.
Nice work. In September / October of last year I was inspired by someone else doing this and showing off they could Zwift with their PTON bike.<p>After some digging around, and figuring out how they encoded the data it was trivial to implement this in a project that was used to keep Flywheel Bikes working.<p><a href="https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon</a><p>The changes I introduced which now include support for the Peloton can be found here: <a href="https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12</a>
Avid mountain biker here. I like to ride outside 4-5 days a week in good weather when I can. I only own a mountain bike and had been looking all summer for a way to get hard core cardio during the winter months. Also, as a resident of the PNW, this year we experienced horrific fires, oppressive smoke, and awful air quality for a significant chunk of September. This meant no cycling.<p>Mountain bikes generally don't work too well with trainers so I started looking at spin bikes. I researched the Peloton and honestly, it's kind of a rip off. Huge upfront cost, limited classes for West Coasters (when I looked, anyway), and that pesky monthly fee. You are paying for brand exclusivity, IMO.<p>I ended up getting a Schwinn IC4 for < $1,000 and no monthly fee. I hook it up to Zwift and an iPad or my TV for structured riding. Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I would still have preferred the Peloton's integrated screen but at literally twice the price of the IC4 (plus ongoing fees for classes if you choose to utilize them), I just couldn't justify it.
This might be the best place to ask. I recently got a Recumbent exercise bike which is compatible with iFit.<p>Does anyone know any apps which are able to communicate with iFit compatible equipment without needing to use the iFit app? I've got a 1 year free account with them but after that it doesn't really feel like their all offers enough for the monthly cost. Really just looking to log my workouts automatically to save needing to manually add them into something like Google Fit.
While I applaud this fine hacker job I am curious about practicality of this.<p>If the goal is to use to use the bike part with the other applications would not it be simpler for user to simply buy any pedal / crank based power-meter. Going this way one can also choose way less expensive spin bikes.<p>If the goal is to share Peloton Bike with the person who actually uses it as originally intended then power meter I think is still valid and less intrusive approach.
Wonderful! I've got one of these things and love it, but hate the classes and never do anything but Just Ride while I watch the news. Seems silly to be paying $40 a month, so at some point I want to find a way to get my stats without a connection to a Peloton server.