Recently I saw a review about a treadmill which was currently on sale, and being somewhat unfit lately with less activities during the Corona times I ordered it.
When it arrived I wanted to test it out immediately, but the included remote control to start/stop and increase/decrease the treadmill speed just didn’t want to work when standing on the treadmill. Looking at the remote I spotted a dimm red light in a small opening at the front, so my first thought was IR, but quickly though that IR usually doesn’t have visible red light. Opening up the remote I found a small RF 433 Mhz board, and holding the board closer to the treadmill main unit, and ‘extending’ the antenna part of the board with my body by touching it with my fingers, the remote suddenly worked when being about 10 cm from the main treadmill unit. Obviously not a distance for using it when actually walking on the treadmill. To see if the problem lay with the remote transmitter unit or with the treadmill receiver unit I used OMG to test how well my RF OMG received the remote commands. Again, here it only worked with less than 10 cm distance from the RF OMG receiver. As a result I mailed the customer support of the online shop about the faulty remote unit, and they said they’d send out a replacement soon. Me wanting to use the treadmill before that though I ended up implementing the treadmill control via OMG, and even implemented voice control through my openHAB backend.
After one week I received the new remote which is working perfectly now, but I still enjoy being able to just say things like “Increase treadmill speed to 6 kmh” or “Turn off treadmill”.
Just a little story I wanted to share to show how OpenMQTTGateway helped me to investigate the problem and to bypass the issue until I received a properly working remote control.
Happy holidays to everybody.