This DIY Arduino Setup Will Help You Keep Cycling Through Quarantine

As of this writing, most people in the world are — at the very least — being heavily encouraged to stay at home in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Many of you are even under enforced quarantines. If you can avoid contact with other people, then your biggest enemy right now is probably boredom. In situations like this, it’s important to continue to get exercise. If cycling is how you usually get in your exercise, then Redditor Alexis_Reddit has come up with a great solution. Using an Arduino, they’ve set up an indoor Google Street View cycling simulator.

In 2017, Google announced that it had gathered Street View data for more than 10 million miles of road. That covers 83 countries, with most “first world” countries virtually completely covered. There are also a number of other, more exotic locations available on Street View. Those include an underwater reef, the Grand Canyon, and even the inside of a few museums. To put it mildly, Google Street View gives you access to a practically unlimited number of virtual miles to explore all around the world. To take advantage of that, you just need a way to get your bicycle talking to a computer with Google Street View running in a browser window.

The setup described by Alexis_Reddit should work with both dedicated exercise bikes and real bikes on exercise stands. The only requirement is that they have a standard speedometer with a Hall effect sensor. An Arduino Uno board monitors that sensor to calculate your current speed. The Arduino is connected to a computer, which runs a NodeJS script to gather that sensor data. It then emulates a press of the forward key in Google Street View at the proper intervals — letting you move down a road. Optionally, it can also send the current speed and distance information to a cell phone so you can see it and keep track of it. If you want an entertaining way to cycle indoors, you may want to replicate this project.