Plex Home Theatre Treadmill

Just a quick post of my adventures hacking my treadmill. I recently bought a new desk but I had to sacrifice a screen in the process. So with that HP spare monitor lying around I wondered what I could possibly use it for? I thought about mounting it near the kitchen and using it as a live shopping list or even an internet connected Google Calendar.

In the end I thought I'd make use of some hardware that was lying around (Raspberry Pi, USB keyboard remote, treadmill). I should mention that my treadmill had undergone a bit of hacking several years ago. I'd installed side speakers which you can see in the picture below. They connect up to a sub woofer that I place at the base of the treadmill.

With all these bits and pieces ready I began to mount my HP monitor to my Treadmill, installed RasPlex and the rest is history. Here's the hardware hacking journey I took. The brackets and nuts cost me $8.22 at Magnet Mart, maybe even less if I hadn't bought the wing nuts, why oh why did I buy them I don't know? Time spent would have been around 90mins (only because I don't have a drill, Macguyver and 3 screwdrivers to the rescue!).

The treadmill victim!!! Many km's have been run on this by me and my wife. It's time to increase the entertainment factor!

This is a cheap but great quality HP IPS LED display I picked up at Harvey Norman. It was a little tricky getting the mount off but I managed to do it without damaging it and can easily re-attach it if I ever need to.

Brackets were cheap!

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Brackets assembled. I couldn't find the opposite of this type of this bracket so I just made do. I really need to place a block of wood between the two to further stabilize it. A job for part 2?

My monitor has legs.

The Raspberry Pi is in there among those cables in it's own little case I bought off their store.

This is after I attached it to the treadmill. I had to take the treadmill console apart in order to make the mounting holes for the monitor.

This is the USB wireless keyboard remote I use to control Plex. It allows me jog and control it at the same time. It's very hard to push buttons on the treadmill console while running which is why I came up with this idea instead.

It's alive!!!

I attached a USB WiFi dongle to the Raspberry Pi and on the first time running RasPlex it detected the network adapter and configured it straight away. Zero setup required, that's what I like!

Inception playing on my treadmill, am I dreaming or jogging?

Close up, you might notice there's a previous hardware hack already where I installed stereo speakers to the sides and they connect to a sub woofer amplifier at the base of my treadmill. I connected the speakers to my Pi using a double ended 3.5 mm cable. Simple stereo output!

I'm a simple hardware hacker whenever possible and to make the process of turning off the treadmill, amp, monitor and raspberry pi simple for my wife I used a power board that had a switch on it. On/Off doesn't get more simple than that right? I taught her to shutdown Plex first on the Raspberry Pi and then once it's powered down flip the switch off on the power board.

So to wrap it up I have to say that this was a success. Wifey has given it her tick of approval and now all that's left is maybe setting up a wake on LAN script to boot up my FreeNAS Plex server when the treadmill starts up.