Tracking the progress of my gym clients

whiteoxe

Its a pretty basic weight lifting gym. I want to upload their workouts to a website. Card readrs seem to involved. Can anyone suggest another way ?

Leon

Just run cables (or use wireless links) to an Ethernet-capable MCU like one of the NXP LPC1768 Cortex-M3 chips, and upload the data directly. No cards required.

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Leon Heller
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM

Timothy D. Swieter

Whiteoxe - your problem (and the solution) are very interesting to me. I have often wondered of some similar ideas when I have worked out at a gym. I have wanted a way to record my particular workout or performance on a piece of equipment as well as a way to store it, recall it and review it later. For instance, a 30 minute workout on a rowing machine could track time, strokes, strokes/minute, etc. Many machines display real-time data and some display the workout trending data, but taking that data and storing it and graphing it would be interesting for some clients. You could possibly use that data to playback an ideal workout (or ghost workout - like in car racing video games where you race against a ghost of a perfect lap).

So how would I go about this? You may want to use RFID cards or buttons or maybe something smaller like iButtons (one-wire buttons). A user who signs up for this program would get the RFID/iButton. When they use a machine they "login" by tapping there card or button and hitting some sort of "start workout button". Each machine has a way to gather metrics on the workout and logs the data. When the work is done, maybe hitting a "logout" button the data can be sent to the web. The web application can get very involved. The machines electronics at the machines may be battery powered and perhaps use ZIGBEE to communicate to a master node that is connected to the Ethernet as this would prevent having to run wires to every machine. The more difficult trick may be gathering the data that should be logged from a machine. The other items like login/out (reading RFID), sending data to the internet, etc are easy problems to solve with hardware/software, but I see instrumenting a machine or hacking the current electronics of a machine as being the unique challenge.

I am one of the people that likes the idea of "things that get measured get managed". I would like a way to log my workouts in my own gym.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
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