37 ms·

Decoding the Peloton

162 points by _ihaque 6y ago

phranger 6y ago
Great read so far, but part III doesn't seem to be there.
- phnofive 6y ago
  Broken link, try: https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...
- _ihaque 6y ago
  Argh, sorry! Must have typoed the link in the header. Should be fixed now.
inezk 6y ago
Amazing work, love this kind of reverse engineering
- _ihaque 6y ago
  Thanks!
pkulak 6y ago
Wonderful! I've got one of these things and love it, but hate the classes and never do anything but Just Ride while I watch the news. Seems silly to be paying $40 a month, so at some point I want to find a way to get my stats without a connection to a Peloton server.
- karosass1 6y ago
  This is probably too late if you have already invested into getting peloton bike, but at that price and considering you don't use classes, I'd rather get decent entry-level road bike and a turbo trainer. So I could train on Zwift, which is 20$ and imo is more fun freeriding experience. And then for data, connect Zwift with Strava so all of it would get uploaded there for tracking the progress. Sorry, this kind of turned into rant/preaching, I'm just biased against Peloton
  - cerebellum42 6y ago
    Agreed, the prices are crazy. Quick comparison: Peloton bike EUR 2145 + EUR 39/month - gets you courses and indoor riding or: Canyon Endurace AL Disc 6.0 as an example of a very solid entry level road bike - EUR 1299 Kickr Core direct drive turbo trainer (good turbo trainer, there are cheaper ones if you go without direct drive) - EUR 799 Combined EUR 2098 + EUR 15/month for a Zwift membership or something comparable. Gets you excellent indoor training AND now you have a bike you can use when the weather gets better! Spend the rest of the up front money on a big fan for indoor training or clothing for outdoor riding.
    - rkangel 6y ago
      I really struggle to justify EUR 1300 as 'entry level'. It might be entry level for being competitive, but if you just want exercise on something decent you can get road bikes for half of that. I have bought (good) cars for less than EUR 1300.
      - hervature 6y ago
        I think that it is more effective to think relative to absolute luxury. The bikes they ride in the Tour de France are $10,000 and so a $1,000 bike is an order of magnitude. Same for cars, and entry level car is like $20,000. An order of magnitude away from Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The $100 bike that most people think are entry level just simply are not worthy of being called exercise/riding material. You will spend more time doing maintenance (fixing the chain and derailleurs) than actually riding the bike. For those that aren’t in the biking world, the components (not the frame) is where most of the money goes. These cheap bikes are only worth it if you never change gears which is ok for the majority of people but then you may as well just get a fixed gear bike.
      - FpUser 6y ago
        Very practical solution would be to take the old beater bike and mount it on direct drive or wheel based trainer permanently. Old used bike can be had for close to nothing
    - 6y ago
- heroprotagonist 6y ago
  Yes, and the way they try to shame you every time you turn on the bike without a subscription is infuriating. It discourages use, which is not what you want from your exercise equipment. I never used their classes. Nothing I used had a technical need for a subscription. But they still want me to pay $40/month to show me a web app with stats my bike sends it to tell me which days I've used it and how I'm doing on my streaks and distance and duration. This information can all be stored locally (and is, presumably, both before and after you send it to them but only with a subscription). I really hope that decoding the Peloton hardware leads to freeing my exercise bike from it's corporate overlords.
- stefan_ 6y ago
  You'll be disappointed because despite the outrageous price for that hunk of metal, they've totally skimped on the power accuracy part of it.
  - kcmastrpc 6y ago
    The new version of the bike is much more accurate according to reviews. However, the signal is now transmitted over USB-C, and probably not nearly as hackable.
- kcmastrpc 6y ago
  https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 I've already done this.
  - pkulak 6y ago
    Starred. Thank you!
hombre_fatal 6y ago
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.
- sneak 6y ago
  I had one (on a bad recommendation from an SV friend) and sold it, because in addition to being totally closed, the music in the classes is also utterly abysmal. I dumped it on craigslist and replaced it with a $250 "dumb" spin bike, a $10 tablet mount, and an Apple watch I already had. I don't get cadence data, but I could with a pedal magnet thing if I actually cared. Their reddit is also heavily astroturfed, which makes me never want to do business with them again. Kudos to them for figuring out how to make 100%+ margins, I guess. It's just very much not for me.
  - dvdbloc 6y ago
    And for even more fun, you can use all the money you saved not buying a Peloton on an enormous television and spin in front of that.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    It's easy for me to shake my fist at them, but if I think about it, maybe their subscription business model might be one of the only things that work. For example, if they opened up their platform, then people could just choose other content sources that are free or pay money into someone else's pocket, like other group classes. Otherwise Peloton could try the eShop approach where their group classes compete on an eShop where they take 30% of the cut, but that market is tiny and still has to compete with just using your iPad while you pedal. On the other hand, I'd consider buying one if there was more to do than group classes and maybe I'm not alone. I'm not cocky enough to think I know what the masses want, but it does seem like their lack of ambition about what can be done with the bike could be leaving a lot of money on the table.
- matsemann 6y ago
aclelland 6y ago
This might be the best place to ask. I recently got a Recumbent exercise bike which is compatible with iFit. Does anyone know any apps which are able to communicate with iFit compatible equipment without needing to use the iFit app? I've got a 1 year free account with them but after that it doesn't really feel like their all offers enough for the monthly cost. Really just looking to log my workouts automatically to save needing to manually add them into something like Google Fit.
FpUser 6y ago
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 is still valid and less intrusive approach.
- kcmastrpc 6y ago
  Back in October another hacker and myself spent some time figuring all this stuff out as well and made a more practical application of the results here: https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 You can already use a rPI and a RS232 USB device to pull metrics off the bike and transmit those signals via BT.
- _ihaque 6y ago
  (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-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...). Also, there's no fun in just buying it ;)
kcmastrpc 6y ago
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 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon The changes I introduced which now include support for the Peloton can be found here: https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12
- _ihaque 6y ago
  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-hardware/#microcontroller-adafruit-feather-32u4-bluefruit-le 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!)
- _ihaque 6y ago
  By the way, do you know if anyone in the gymnasticon community has cracked the meaning of the initialization packets sent at bootup? I have a partial decoding of the first two packets: the second includes bike ID and some other stuff, but no idea on the first.
_ihaque 6y ago
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-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...), and the GitHub repo (https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon) has both Fritzing board layout files and the source code for the device.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I'm a pretty serious road cyclist, so I get LOTS of questions about training, and about Peloton in particular, which is weird because serious outdoor riders are not really Peloton's market AT ALL. It's always been for spin people, and spin classes are their own thing entirely. Certainly SOME of my riding pals do spin during the week, but most of them are doing structured workouts using TrainerRoad or TrainingPeaks or Zwift and a smart trainer attached to a real bike. (Mostly, it's their old bike, because cyclists nearly always have more than one bike.) Indoor training for cyclists has, for the last 15 or so years, generally been focused on power targets. You do some fitness tests to determine your maximum hourly wattage, and then your workouts are expressed as a series of X minutes at Y% of your max power, etc. This is tedious if you're using an old-style, fixed-resistance trainer, because you're watching the clock during the intervals and then shifting on the bike to achieve higher or lower levels of resistance in order to hit the right power target at a reasonable cadence. Honestly, this SUCKS. Smart trainers take that out of it by dynamically adjusting the resistance for each segment during the workout, so all you really have to do is keep pedaling at the desired cadence (typically 90-95 rpm); sometimes it's harder, and sometimes it's easier. You don't have to manage anything. It's awesome. (I watch bad movies on the trainer now.) The Peloton, as I understand, doesn't dynamically adjust its resistance. I'm baffled by this, given how home training is for go-fast cyclists, but maybe that's just not a thing spin people want.
- _ihaque 6y ago
  (Author here) The Peloton also has power zone training similar to what you mentioned. With the instructors nattering on in the background, occasionally rotating the dial isn't so bad. I believe the newer version of the bike does have automatic resistance control, though.
  - Wheaties466 6y ago
    yes the bike+ is advertised as being able to do that. But I haven't figured out how to take advantage of that.
    - Graphguy 6y ago
cols 6y ago
Avid mountain biker here. I like to ride outside 4-5 days a week in good weather when I can. I only own a mountain bike and had been looking all summer for a way to get hard core cardio during the winter months. Also, as a resident of the PNW, this year we experienced horrific fires, oppressive smoke, and awful air quality for a significant chunk of September. This meant no cycling. Mountain bikes generally don't work too well with trainers so I started looking at spin bikes. I researched the Peloton and honestly, it's kind of a rip off. Huge upfront cost, limited classes for West Coasters (when I looked, anyway), and that pesky monthly fee. You are paying for brand exclusivity, IMO. I ended up getting a Schwinn IC4 for < $1,000 and no monthly fee. I hook it up to Zwift and an iPad or my TV for structured riding. Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I would still have preferred the Peloton's integrated screen but at literally twice the price of the IC4 (plus ongoing fees for classes if you choose to utilize them), I just couldn't justify it.
- rconti 6y ago
  Granted, Peloton Digital classes are more expensive than Zwift, but if you're ever interested, there's a whole culture of folks who use Peloton content on other bikes. Search for "Peloton app riders". It looks like the IC4 supports power, so I highly recommend doing power training on Zwift, particularly for mountain biking. (I'm an ex-PNWer :) )
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  Pretty similar to what I did given the weather issues (right down to the Schiwnn IC4 purchase). However, I'm more of a road biker and so definitely haven't felt great about the lack of dynamic resistance but better than not biking at all. We even had the Peloton subscription for a little while but opted for other classes in the end.

162 points by _ihaque 6y ago

phranger 6y ago

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

phnofive 6y ago
Broken link, try: https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...
_ihaque 6y ago
Argh, sorry! Must have typoed the link in the header. Should be fixed now.

inezk 6y ago

Amazing work, love this kind of reverse engineering

_ihaque 6y ago
Thanks!

pkulak 6y ago

Wonderful! I've got one of these things and love it, but hate the classes and never do anything but Just Ride while I watch the news. Seems silly to be paying $40 a month, so at some point I want to find a way to get my stats without a connection to a Peloton server.

karosass1 6y ago
This is probably too late if you have already invested into getting peloton bike, but at that price and considering you don't use classes, I'd rather get decent entry-level road bike and a turbo trainer. So I could train on Zwift, which is 20$ and imo is more fun freeriding experience. And then for data, connect Zwift with Strava so all of it would get uploaded there for tracking the progress. Sorry, this kind of turned into rant/preaching, I'm just biased against Peloton
- cerebellum42 6y ago
  Agreed, the prices are crazy. Quick comparison: Peloton bike EUR 2145 + EUR 39/month - gets you courses and indoor riding or: Canyon Endurace AL Disc 6.0 as an example of a very solid entry level road bike - EUR 1299 Kickr Core direct drive turbo trainer (good turbo trainer, there are cheaper ones if you go without direct drive) - EUR 799 Combined EUR 2098 + EUR 15/month for a Zwift membership or something comparable. Gets you excellent indoor training AND now you have a bike you can use when the weather gets better! Spend the rest of the up front money on a big fan for indoor training or clothing for outdoor riding.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    I really struggle to justify EUR 1300 as 'entry level'. It might be entry level for being competitive, but if you just want exercise on something decent you can get road bikes for half of that. I have bought (good) cars for less than EUR 1300.
    - hervature 6y ago
      I think that it is more effective to think relative to absolute luxury. The bikes they ride in the Tour de France are $10,000 and so a $1,000 bike is an order of magnitude. Same for cars, and entry level car is like $20,000. An order of magnitude away from Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The $100 bike that most people think are entry level just simply are not worthy of being called exercise/riding material. You will spend more time doing maintenance (fixing the chain and derailleurs) than actually riding the bike. For those that aren’t in the biking world, the components (not the frame) is where most of the money goes. These cheap bikes are only worth it if you never change gears which is ok for the majority of people but then you may as well just get a fixed gear bike.
    - FpUser 6y ago
      Very practical solution would be to take the old beater bike and mount it on direct drive or wheel based trainer permanently. Old used bike can be had for close to nothing
  - 6y ago
heroprotagonist 6y ago
Yes, and the way they try to shame you every time you turn on the bike without a subscription is infuriating. It discourages use, which is not what you want from your exercise equipment. I never used their classes. Nothing I used had a technical need for a subscription. But they still want me to pay $40/month to show me a web app with stats my bike sends it to tell me which days I've used it and how I'm doing on my streaks and distance and duration. This information can all be stored locally (and is, presumably, both before and after you send it to them but only with a subscription). I really hope that decoding the Peloton hardware leads to freeing my exercise bike from it's corporate overlords.
stefan_ 6y ago
You'll be disappointed because despite the outrageous price for that hunk of metal, they've totally skimped on the power accuracy part of it.
- kcmastrpc 6y ago
  The new version of the bike is much more accurate according to reviews. However, the signal is now transmitted over USB-C, and probably not nearly as hackable.
kcmastrpc 6y ago
https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 I've already done this.
- pkulak 6y ago
  Starred. Thank you!

hombre_fatal 6y ago

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.

sneak 6y ago
I had one (on a bad recommendation from an SV friend) and sold it, because in addition to being totally closed, the music in the classes is also utterly abysmal. I dumped it on craigslist and replaced it with a $250 "dumb" spin bike, a $10 tablet mount, and an Apple watch I already had. I don't get cadence data, but I could with a pedal magnet thing if I actually cared. Their reddit is also heavily astroturfed, which makes me never want to do business with them again. Kudos to them for figuring out how to make 100%+ margins, I guess. It's just very much not for me.
- dvdbloc 6y ago
  And for even more fun, you can use all the money you saved not buying a Peloton on an enormous television and spin in front of that.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  It's easy for me to shake my fist at them, but if I think about it, maybe their subscription business model might be one of the only things that work. For example, if they opened up their platform, then people could just choose other content sources that are free or pay money into someone else's pocket, like other group classes. Otherwise Peloton could try the eShop approach where their group classes compete on an eShop where they take 30% of the cut, but that market is tiny and still has to compete with just using your iPad while you pedal. On the other hand, I'd consider buying one if there was more to do than group classes and maybe I'm not alone. I'm not cocky enough to think I know what the masses want, but it does seem like their lack of ambition about what can be done with the bike could be leaving a lot of money on the table.
matsemann 6y ago

aclelland 6y ago

This might be the best place to ask. I recently got a Recumbent exercise bike which is compatible with iFit. Does anyone know any apps which are able to communicate with iFit compatible equipment without needing to use the iFit app? I've got a 1 year free account with them but after that it doesn't really feel like their all offers enough for the monthly cost. Really just looking to log my workouts automatically to save needing to manually add them into something like Google Fit.

FpUser 6y ago

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 is still valid and less intrusive approach.

kcmastrpc 6y ago
Back in October another hacker and myself spent some time figuring all this stuff out as well and made a more practical application of the results here: https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 You can already use a rPI and a RS232 USB device to pull metrics off the bike and transmit those signals via BT.
_ihaque 6y ago
(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-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...). Also, there's no fun in just buying it ;)

kcmastrpc 6y ago

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 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon The changes I introduced which now include support for the Peloton can be found here: https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12 https://github.com/ptx2/gymnasticon/pull/12

_ihaque 6y ago
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-hardware/#microcontroller-adafruit-feather-32u4-bluefruit-le 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!)
_ihaque 6y ago
By the way, do you know if anyone in the gymnasticon community has cracked the meaning of the initialization packets sent at bootup? I have a partial decoding of the first two packets: the second includes bike ID and some other stuff, but no idea on the first.

_ihaque 6y ago

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-hardware/ https://ihaque.org/posts/2020/12/28/pelomon-part-iii-hardwar...), and the GitHub repo (https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon) has both Fritzing board layout files and the source code for the device.

ubermonkey 6y ago

I'm a pretty serious road cyclist, so I get LOTS of questions about training, and about Peloton in particular, which is weird because serious outdoor riders are not really Peloton's market AT ALL. It's always been for spin people, and spin classes are their own thing entirely. Certainly SOME of my riding pals do spin during the week, but most of them are doing structured workouts using TrainerRoad or TrainingPeaks or Zwift and a smart trainer attached to a real bike. (Mostly, it's their old bike, because cyclists nearly always have more than one bike.) Indoor training for cyclists has, for the last 15 or so years, generally been focused on power targets. You do some fitness tests to determine your maximum hourly wattage, and then your workouts are expressed as a series of X minutes at Y% of your max power, etc. This is tedious if you're using an old-style, fixed-resistance trainer, because you're watching the clock during the intervals and then shifting on the bike to achieve higher or lower levels of resistance in order to hit the right power target at a reasonable cadence. Honestly, this SUCKS. Smart trainers take that out of it by dynamically adjusting the resistance for each segment during the workout, so all you really have to do is keep pedaling at the desired cadence (typically 90-95 rpm); sometimes it's harder, and sometimes it's easier. You don't have to manage anything. It's awesome. (I watch bad movies on the trainer now.) The Peloton, as I understand, doesn't dynamically adjust its resistance. I'm baffled by this, given how home training is for go-fast cyclists, but maybe that's just not a thing spin people want.

_ihaque 6y ago
(Author here) The Peloton also has power zone training similar to what you mentioned. With the instructors nattering on in the background, occasionally rotating the dial isn't so bad. I believe the newer version of the bike does have automatic resistance control, though.
- Wheaties466 6y ago
  yes the bike+ is advertised as being able to do that. But I haven't figured out how to take advantage of that.
  - Graphguy 6y ago

cols 6y ago

Avid mountain biker here. I like to ride outside 4-5 days a week in good weather when I can. I only own a mountain bike and had been looking all summer for a way to get hard core cardio during the winter months. Also, as a resident of the PNW, this year we experienced horrific fires, oppressive smoke, and awful air quality for a significant chunk of September. This meant no cycling. Mountain bikes generally don't work too well with trainers so I started looking at spin bikes. I researched the Peloton and honestly, it's kind of a rip off. Huge upfront cost, limited classes for West Coasters (when I looked, anyway), and that pesky monthly fee. You are paying for brand exclusivity, IMO. I ended up getting a Schwinn IC4 for < $1,000 and no monthly fee. I hook it up to Zwift and an iPad or my TV for structured riding. Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I would still have preferred the Peloton's integrated screen but at literally twice the price of the IC4 (plus ongoing fees for classes if you choose to utilize them), I just couldn't justify it.

rconti 6y ago
Granted, Peloton Digital classes are more expensive than Zwift, but if you're ever interested, there's a whole culture of folks who use Peloton content on other bikes. Search for "Peloton app riders". It looks like the IC4 supports power, so I highly recommend doing power training on Zwift, particularly for mountain biking. (I'm an ex-PNWer :) )
darkwizard42 6y ago
Pretty similar to what I did given the weather issues (right down to the Schiwnn IC4 purchase). However, I'm more of a road biker and so definitely haven't felt great about the lack of dynamic resistance but better than not biking at all. We even had the Peloton subscription for a little while but opted for other classes in the end.