Internet Browsing That Only Goes As Fast As You Run On Your Treadmill

We’ve all seen those desk/treadmill mods where you can work while slowly walking on the treadmill. It’s a great way to keep your body moving if you would otherwise be sitting still all day. Joe from Book Of Joe is one of my favorite bloggers. He’s an anesthesiologist, so he understands the importance of moving. He has his computer attached to his treadmill, and he walks constantly. The mod I’m sharing with you today even incorporates Internet browsing.

This Internet browsing treadmill hack isn’t something that would necessarily be practical for everyday use, but I can still appreciate the idea behind it. I mean, nobody would want to run for bandwidth all day long. It was created by Brian Peiris with a secondhand treadmill he bought off Craigslist (or the Canadian equivalent of Craigslist), a desk from IKEA, an Arduino and some code.

According to Hack A Day:

“After removing the treadmill’s original time/distance display, he reverse engineered the speed sensor to send data to an Arduino and his PC…What makes this project stand out is a simple script using the Throxy Python library which allows the treadmill to throttle his machine’s Internet connection.”

There is a minimum bandwidth to keep the connection live, so hypothetically, if you are running on this thing and you have to stop for a minute, you wouldn’t lose your connection completely. You’d be able to continue your Internet browsing until you caught your breath and started again.

His inspiration for this idea came from a comment he read on reddit. It’s quite a brilliant little hack, and you can read all the details and see the code by clicking over to Brian’s website (linked above). If there’s one thing this makes me realize, it’s that I sit too much during the day when I’m on my computer. What a fun project Brian! Great job.