Decoding the Peloton • Hacker News Board

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#41

Post by _ihaque » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

kcmastrpc wrote: post #38

Nice work. In September / October of last year I was inspired by someone else doing this and showing off they could Zwift with their PTON bike. After some digging around, and figuring out how they encoded the data it was trivial to implement this in a project that was used to keep Flywheel Bikes working. https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon The changes I introduced which now include support for the Peloton can be foun…

Yeah! I saw your blog post about reviving your Flywheel and decided to finally take this project on. Thanks for the inspiration!

(No thanks for writing your code in Node ;) https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar.... The gymnasticon code was helpful to see before I tracked down the XML specs for the BLE characteristics, though!)

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#42

Post by _ihaque » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #32

matsemann wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about introversion, it's the format of the workouts. There are so much more that could have been done with the hardware, instead of limiting to this small use case. For instance I bike with my club on Zwift using Discord in a group setting. I participate in Zwift races against others. All social stuff, just different.

Apparently there is a indiegogo or other crowdsourcing company that is making a conversion of peloton to allow people to use zwift by putting some hardware on top. Not ideal but gives the bike more function. Will be interested to seee if it’s any good. Clearly not as good as my wahoo kikr

It wouldn't be too hard to make a modification to the PeloMon that allowed this. Right now it is a listen-only device, but with an added UART it could just as well control the Bike.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#43

Post by silicon2401 » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

0x1F8B wrote: post #31

chrisseaton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was floored when I realized the Peloton has no games and it's closed to third-party developers. It seems to just have group classes which couldn't be less interesting to me. I don't understand what you thought the product was? It's an exercise bike. You do exercise classes on it. It's not a games machine. What were they thinking? They were thinking it's an exercise bike.

This is a grouchy reply. The OP obviously isn't trying to get Tekken running on a Peloton. You can imagine "games" in this sense being competitions played out via the bike, so time trials, race tournaments, etc. Compete with your friends (or others) to get through a race comparable to Tour de France stages -- something like that. Aside from survival, there is no greater motivator for pushing oneself physically than c…

> Aside from survival, there is no greater motivator for pushing oneself physically than competition

If you're a competitive person. Not everybody derives motivation from competition.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#44

Post by _ihaque » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #33

While I applaud this fine hacker job I am curious about practicality of this. If the goal is to use to use the bike part with the other applications would not it be simpler for user to simply buy any pedal / crank based power-meter. Going this way one can also choose way less expensive spin bikes. If the goal is to share Peloton Bike with the person who actually uses it as originally intended then power meter I think…

(Author here)

Power meter pedals are significantly more expensive than the bits that went into this project. (There's a complete BOM in the follow-up post: https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...).

Also, there's no fun in just buying it ;)

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#45

Post by _ihaque » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

phranger wrote: post #2

Great read so far, but part III doesn't seem to be there.

Argh, sorry! Must have typoed the link in the header. Should be fixed now.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#46

Post by _ihaque » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

Author here. This work actually dates back from August-October of last year for the most part, but I didn't get to finish writing it up till the holidays. Happy to take questions here or on Twitter (see my profile).

If anyone is interested in building their own PeloMon, a full BOM is present at the bottom of the third post in the series (https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...), and the GitHub repo (https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon) has both Fritzing board layout files and the source code for the device.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#47

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #20

chrisseaton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was floored when I realized the Peloton has no games and it's closed to third-party developers. It seems to just have group classes which couldn't be less interesting to me. I don't understand what you thought the product was? It's an exercise bike. You do exercise classes on it. It's not a games machine. What were they thinking? They were thinking it's an exercise bike.

By games, I assume parent was talking about things like zwift, which is even called out in the article. Most exercise bikes that cost similar to peloton support working with external software so you can do things like race on a virtual course. And gamification through badges is pretty standard exercise fair. My parent’s senior community even has gamification via small prizes for how many days you go to the gym.

FWIW Peloton does have some of that gamification stuff, at least for the standalone offering (no bike etc). You get badges for taking different numbers of each type of class, daily/weekly streaks, total minutes, special events etc. They also send a summary email each month showing which days you worked out, badges earned, number of classes/minutes, and deltas from the previous month.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#48

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #19

rkangel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess that it's actually a classic razorblades model - the real product is the classes and the bike is just a way to be able to do the classes from home. It's probably not surprising that a group of tech people tends more towards introversion and exercising alone, whereas the general population likes the group aspect for motivation.

It's not about introversion, it's the format of the workouts. There are so much more that could have been done with the hardware, instead of limiting to this small use case. For instance I bike with my club on Zwift using Discord in a group setting. I participate in Zwift races against others. All social stuff, just different.

All the mainstream exercise gear seems to be pretty locked down AFAIK. In the rowing area, even the latest Concept2 controllers look to be pretty old school though they do seem to have a way to connect to phone apps these days. (Though there still isn't a lot there.)

Hydrow goes for the more immersive experience--haven't used one; don't know if it has any third-party support or not.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#49

Post by onion2k » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #6

I was floored when I realized the Peloton has no games and it's closed to third-party developers. It seems to just have group classes which couldn't be less interesting to me. I'd ask "what were they thinking?" but it apparently sells like hotcakes, so it's me who's out of touch.

Adding games would get "people who want serious exercise equipment that they can play games on" to come to the product, but it might also put off "people who want serious exercise equipment to focus on exercise". In other words, adding games could actually make their market smaller. This is similar to Nintendo's rigourous curation of their platforms - allowing the latest Call of Duty game on the Switch might add a few million in sales, but only at the cost of losing tens of millions of people who like the fact the Switch doesn't have that sort of game. Their market is bigger if they say no to things the market doesn't want to be associated with.

This is a pretty classic problem in product management - you have to avoid adding features what could drive your largest market away from the product.

Re: Decoding the Peloton

#50

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

hedberg10 wrote: post #18

ramphastidae wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peloton is a fad and will be dropped for the next exercise fad in 2-5 years, just like SoulCycle was. For now, they are feasting.

You can ridicule fads, but I think it's interesting. I know people will pay a reasonable price for a product they might not even need, but an unreasonable price? How the hell does that happen?

Fads (at all price classes) are interesting. There are definitely products/activities that become very popular for a time and then just sort of fade out for no discernible reason.

One good example is in-line skating/rollerblading. It was a very popular activity--at least in urban areas--a number of years back and it just sort of petered out. You rarely see someone skating these days.