Gadgetory

we've identified a problem with pretty much every desk on the market the traditional sitting desk has all kinds of ergonomic and posture challenges and of course encourages a more sedentary lifestyle and then there's the new-age standing desk well with the standing desk you know you stand and there are a lot of claims being made about how these might help offset the gigantic cake that you're apparently eating for lunch and making matters worse these standing desks are inordinately expensive in many cases so we thought leave it to us we've got the solution for less than a couple hundred bucks we're gonna build the desk that forces you to stay in shape memory express is dedicated to being the go-to shop for electronics in Canada and with their uber price beat guarantee they'll beat any authorized Canadian retailers price by 10% of the difference click the link below to learn more so you want a desk that keeps you fit where do you start well there are actually commercially available treadmill desks but they are freaking expensive so we set out to make something a bit more economical now given that many maybe even most people should probably have a bike lying around and if they don't you can get one for pretty cheap on Craigslist we figured that seemed like a good place to start but how could we make sure that the user actually pedaled on it and didn't just sit on the bike seat feeling like they were exercising could we maybe generate the power for the computer using the bike well that seemed a bit harsh but what if we took away their Internet whenever they stopped pedaling now we're getting somewhere so we set about creating a small generator from a bike that could be used to power the users internet switch after ordering a bike fitness trainer an electric motor and a charge controller from Amazon we were ready to get started now you might think that we should put the electric motor directly onto the flywheel of the fitness trainer but we need the motor to be spinning at around 3,000 RPM and we're not going to be hitting anywhere near that on the bike so we need to create a gear reduction from the bike to about two and a half two inches something like that so the plan was to use a V belt attached to the tire and then onto one of these pulleys which came in from Amazon and the bore diameter is just totally wrong and will not fit onto here so now we're just going to kind of raw dog it and see what happens the flywheel was removed from the fitness trainer and the tire was removed from the rim allowing the belt to sit directly on the rim the tires needed to come off Alex's bike anyway after he ran over some beer bottles that someone kindly smashed on the road so that worked out great for everyone so the plan since our diecast pulleys aren't going to work or to laser cut out pieces of wood have one that fits over this sprocket and have a couple that go along the shaft here and sort of screw them all together and hopefully can transmit the torque after a little bit of CAD we were ready to fire the laser fire the laser look if we can just transmit the torque with this it's gonna be like done tomorrow look on a scale of 1 to absolutely horrendous where would you rate this I do okay I'll take up do you think that we just got someone to sort of hold this and then we pedaled we could just see if it's going to work with the wooden pulley attached and screwed together we were actually we weren't that hopeful at this point so that's got a bit of stickiness I don't like fits in the groove pretty well yeah what was called fricken part of the exercise experience with very little to lose we geared up to see if this plan could work at all we would need to make sure that we could have the motor spinning at over 3,000 rpm without the poor wooden pulley blowing to pieces so we're getting like 27 volt so clearly we need this to me mounted better than just me holding it but after proving that at least in theory this should work we needed to make a more permanent mount for the motor so we need to lift the motor up about this high so that the belt doesn't hit on the frame here and I'm kind of thinking that we might be best off making a frame so we sort of put two here and then one across and that's where the motor actually mounts it would be nice though if there's some way for us to tighten it do you have any ideas it's not how you're supposed to use these tools of sketching know about just camera though editor's note that one didn't happen you know just realized this is the dirty prototype why do I even bother drilling 4 holes you having just to sandbag that for sure the electric motor will be connected to this solar charge controller which will take the constantly changing voltage out of the motor and output a nice clean 12 volts from here it will go to this 12 volt inverter which will turn the 12 volts into 120 volt AC so that you could plug any device into it like a normal outlet we weren't entirely sure if this would work since you might need a battery between the controller and inverter on there what if this will work oh my Foley actually it kind of looks like that I just forgot to put them that on so if I start pedaling and you press the button that's on that nothing yeah we must need a battery in there Darrin fitness PC your grab dead because he was over here taking candy stairs for to actually work we need this battery here between the solar charger and the inverter and that basically just allows the solar charger to actually turn on and then it does its thing so ed start pedaling so when this lights blinking slowly that means that we're actually getting charged into the battery and that means that it's around 24 ish volts or so now what we need to do is have it so that if Edie stops pedaling this light turns off because right now it's just staying on until the battery drains which is way too long and it's not nearly as would you call electric Oni and as we want because the idea is to punish the user whenever they stop exercising we needed to add a relay where did I put that relay that closes a switch when the user starts pedaling completing a circuit and sending power from the battery to the inverter then immediately opens it disconnecting the circuit once the user stops pedaling with the relay added into the circuit well it was time to see if it works yes aha and then if I stop yes aha I don't want to call it a success but it is a definitely a prototype that works I learned so much about electronics today with v1 working all that was left was to clean things up a bit so I kind of want to just laser cut a piece of wood that'll go sort of around here out for some sand bags and have perfect mounts to the motor and then on Monday we'll have to thrust bearing arrive for this and we're basically done just clean up the electronics a bit put it in like a nice box or something yes do we have to make a nice box the best box I can't make good boxes though we could laser cut a box and you basically know how this works now CAD laser and boom we're good to go except wood is a pain I think it's fine and different pieces can have slightly different properties so a bit of TLC was even here there it's still looking pretty good it's a four foot job you can get pretty close like that works a bit with the top piece cut we attached some two by fours on the bottom for support and edy filled in the letters using permanent marker since we couldn't just leave the electronics lying on the floor we decided to stash them in a den case using double sided tape and after a little bit of love everything actually fit in surprisingly well any holes were closed using acrylic damnit haha well that actually cut me are you bleeding looks like we yeah and in the end it's not looking half bad if we do say so ourselves so now that the Fitness PC mm is ready to be set up at an actual desk well maybe it's time for us to show it to me is that just sharpie marker wow that actually looks surprisingly good like good for what we would normally do yeah okay sandbag goes here so basically what we've just got a motor here with it did you make this out of wood why give a man a Laser laser cutter the laser cut anything 200 watts you mean you see power okay so 200 watts is our maximum output here you guys probably realize then that if you have a powerful rig that's not enough for you to actually power up your gaming machine while you gain but any more than that would be quite difficult for most people to to do just by pedaling anyway so should we evaluate now just how usable this is yeah so you know here what what should i what should I try to do just browse the forum watch some YouTube videos I got to say it is a little bit harder to type while I'm you know going ham on the on the exercise bicycle but it's not as bad as you might think oh look at this I'm not operated mess thank all these crit what are these nice tech tips guys doing one thing that is a little bit tough is you can actually feel the resistance changing sometimes like it'll it'll almost like it'll let you know when you need to give her a little bit more do we know why exactly that is I have to do with the battery charging or so what could I do that would make it draw more power should we try to power the whole the whole thing with it yeah let's do it let's do it okay so here we go powering up the computer Wow so you get like a real physical feedback for the amount of power that your components are drawing like during guna Oh like it initialized something there I felt it whoa that is some good resistance we got going here I'm gonna work up a sweat pretty quick here let's get this demo going you know that's actually not that bad and it's a constant load now where is like the spikes and CPU activity before I could really feel them you would get absolutely crap okay that really is really unforgiving the second generation of this product definitely needs like a Philips hue that gives you like a reading on your battery or like a capacitor right so if you had a big fat capacitor and then it was like green when it's full and then would slowly go to yellow and red that would be cool you'd probably want to get one of those stupid mice from thermaltake that has the fan in it they have a keyboard with one to keep your keep your palms from getting too sweaty and your arms from getting too heavy this might be a little extreme I think having it plugged into the network switch is good enough okay sure to try and play a game come on okay place yes go ah no no no just load the math come on just I just want to play one round okay CT here we go so CP use it like 25% and GPUs going up as high as like 80-100 Oh almost fell behind for a second there no I give up the new Volta XL charging cable delivers great value durability and some enhancements over the original it's capable of delivering up to 87 watts at 4.3 m/s allowing it to be compatible with fast charging devices with on the go charging functionality it'll allow your phone to act as a battery bank to help you charge up other gadgets and the snag safe tips are made from an N 52 neodymium magnet that offers a strong solid connection which enables you to quickly connect your devices but also acts as a safety in case you get your cables caught on anything they're made of strong military grade nylon and they come with a lifetime guarantee on the cable so check out their IndieGoGo page at the link in the video description oh oh my legs so if the goal was an exercise bike that makes you literally get a sweat the mission fucking accomplished the fitness PC is a huge success so thanks again for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description all sit down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one but not pre soaked and sweat and our community forum which you should totally join I am like actually dripping all over the place right now