The Concept

I recently purchased a combination Rower/Recumbent Bike to replace a 15+ year old exercise bike that worked, but was just too boring to be on.  Overall, this machine has worked really well so far.  Having both a Rower/Bike in one package is definitely a big plus.  That said, there is one area in which this machine sorely lacking; data presentation/sharing functionality.  Even though this machine is at least 15 years newer (and $300 more expensive) than the exercise bike it replaced, they essentially use a basic LCD to display information (i.e. speed, distance etc...).  No colored display, no Bluetooth/smartphone app.  What's more, it seems the majority of consumer oriented exercise machines on the market use this type of LCD display.  Trust me, I was actively looking a rower with this functionality.  It's like the manufactures of these machines hired a few engineers 20 years ago to design the display and never bothered to update them ever since.  But hey, like the saying goes, if it's not broken ...

Well, I for one would like to be able to grab the usage data from this machine is more elegant way than manually copying the values from the LCD screens.  The way I see it, this can be accomplished in one of three ways.

1. See if the manufacture provides are more advance display with Bluetooth that can be swap out for the basic one.  No such luck there ...
2. Created a real mobile app that reads values directly from the LCD screen. This should work, but it's rather cumbersome, not to mention that such an app would probable be hard to code given the machine vision involved.
3. Hack into the heart rate and speed sensor directly using an Arduino like micro-controller for data logging /transmission.

I like the third option since it easy to remove the LCD display to reveal the standard connections for the heart rate and speed sensors.  It is almost as though the company always intended for this to be upgraded, or it just has a high rate of failure so making it easily replaceable make sense.  In either case this design should make option three more doable.  Stay tuned ...