Clockwork Active Media Systems

The project started with some inspiration:

And a treadmill.   Getting the treadmill for free helped control costs.

Once the treadmill was fetched, the walkstation became a Lab Day project.  Lab Day is that special day of the month where people work on anything that strikes their fancy.

An important factor is that treadmills have very different-shaped arms and consoles.  The video above has a nice general solution for hooking brackets to flat treadmill arms.   But our treadmill has arms with a gentle slope, like the rolling hills of Spain near Asturias.

Upon inspection of the treadmill, we realized we could make a custom fitted desk attachment that would be super-sweet and super-simple and super-cheap.  Each of these things is as important as the others.

The treadmill has a strong front handlebar, which was key.

We purchased three 1"x12" straight brackets (sometimes called mending braces) from a local store. These sit on top of the handlebar.   Two pieces of wood are screwed to one end of the brackets.   These fit snugly against the backside of the treadmill's instrument panel.



The other sides of the brackets are screwed into the desk piece.  It balances real nice on that handlebar.  It can also be removed easily.

That's the basic design.   

Now check out the desk surface, because that's where we got fancy.

It's made from 3/4" cabinet-grade plywood.  It would have cost $25 new, but there was a remnant in someone's basement.

We beveled the edges.  This was done with a table saw, which was a bad idea.  A router is a better choice.  But sometimes you have to obey when the table saw speaks.   Even if it says to do bad things.   Awful things.  Things you can never tell anyone.   

After the edges were beveled, we found an art person to do some art stuff.   Everyone suggested cool design ideas, like an ace of spades, or a wizard, or a big skull on fire, swooping out of the sky, and the skull is also breathing fire.   After some discussion, we decided the wizard and ace of spades could be combined into an ace of spades wizard.   That's as far as we got before the art person walked away. In the end he did some kind of logo, which is boring.  But he woodburned it, which you gotta respect.

After the varnish, our project was done! (See the full set of photos here.)



Then we all walked it out.  The employees from the west side of the building walked it out.  Then the ones from the south side of the building walked it out.  Then those from the east side walked it out.  Finally the interns walked it out.