About ErgPower

This simple little website is the home of all the documentation for my attempt to replace the flywheel of a Concept2 Ergometer (AKA Indoor Rowing Machine) with a generator. This allows the energy generated by a rower’s workout to be used to generate some green energy for low-power tasks like charging phones and other portable devices rather than being wasted on moving some air molecules around.

Origin Story

This project came about as a means to fulfill a few different purposes:

  • To continue the legacy of John X Linnehan, a Florida-based activist who fought for “peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability”
  • To add indoor rowing machines to the list of green energy-producing fitness equipment like the ones that are made by The Green Microgym
  • To apply some of the the work done in a paper from Worcester Polytechnic Institute investigating the potential for power generation using a Concept2 Indoor Rowing Machine (Ergometer)

Project Goal

The primary goal of this project is to generate a usable amount of power from an indoor rowing machine flywheel while ideally keeping the feel and resistance of the machine the same.

However, there are also some other potential goals that can be reached once this is achieved, such as:

  • improving upon the feel of rowing on an erg to make it much more waterlike (or even customizable)
  • developing this idea into some kind of add-on or swappable part that can be used to retrofit existing Ergometers to generate green power

Why publish the details?

This project is being conducted in such a radically free and open way for a few reasons:

  1. To inspire others to become interested in similar projects and some of the science behind them
  2. Because it acts as a safegaurd. Publishing all of the details about the project allows someone else to pick it up and continue the project in case I inevitably get distracted by another project or dont have time because of school
  3. It allows people who are interested in this type of work to discover and contribute to the project. As a computing student I am very much underqualified to take on a project like this completely solo and without the help of others I likely would not get very far.
  4. Society is just better for everyone when the tools, products, and ideas of others are freely available for everyone to access. Every new idea stands on the shoulders of the ideas the came before it.

The idea for conducting the project this way was partially inspired by Relativity, the open-source Build-it-yourself VR headset.

Where’d the logo come from?

Honestly I pretty much just threw it together in Inkscape because the website template/theme that I am using had a space for one. I’m a Computing student, not a Graphic Designer so if you think you can do better, go for it!

The current logo was inspired by the following Creative comons images:

Contact

If you are interested in this project and feel like reaching out, my email address is on my website. I also plan to set up some kind of communication platform in the future if enough people are interested.

Credits

This project would not be possible without the help and support of the following people:

  • Ben Clements