Unbricking a $2,000 Bike With a $10 Raspberry Pi

BRANK

July 31, 2020The Flywheel Home Bike. Image: Flywheel Sports.A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.The bike is the Flywheel Home Bike by Flywheel Sports. You open up the app, pick a class, and start riding. The app shows you a live video stream of an instructor, your position on the leaderboard so you can compete with the other people in the class, and your realtime stats like power (watts) and cadence (rpm). There’s all the usual motivational badges that come with fitness apps these days, and each ride is logged so you can track your progress over time.Or, that’s how it used to work anyway.Flywheel recently and abruptly shut down the Home Bike service following a legal battle with their competitor, Peloton. The …