Many of the exercise bikes you’ll find in the gym will have small screens for watching content while you workout, and you can now replicate that at home with an Arduino and Netflix.

This project by electronic engineering student Ronan Byrne uses an Arduino Nano connected to a standard exercise bike which, after a bit of hacking, can read the speed of a rider.

This setup is connected to a laptop over USB which then runs a custom programme made in Python. Starting the programme opens up Netflix where you can then log in and set up your workout details such as ride time and the minimum speed you need to stay over to keep the stream up.

Once you get peddling the stream will stay active as long as you’re going fast enough. You can see it in action below being used during Ant-Man.

There were some problems along the way to getting this to work. Byrne originally wanted to use a Raspberry Pi instead of an Arduino, but he found problems getting it to work with a browser which would accept his code.

As it stands now the project uses Firefox instead of an intended Chromium variant.

There’s a few additions proposed for the code, including saving workout details, sound effects for rounds and, maybe most importantly, preventing the user from manually unpausing Netflix.

If you want more details on how this build came together, and how you can replicate it, make sure you check out Byrne’s personal blog as well as the Instructables page.