By Todd Westley, EAA 566527

Years before pursuing my engineering degree from Virginia Tech, my Uncle Steve took me to Oshkosh for EAA’s air show. As an adult, I moved to Ohio from Maryland, and he began constructing a plansbuilt Cub in Pennsylvania. I thought I should know something about aviation before the Cub’s completion. I also wanted to preserve my cycling fitness through the Ohio winters. So, I combined those two desires.

I modified software that allows a spinning wheel to control the throttle position in FlightGear, an open source (i.e., free) software program. I have my bike mounted to a bicycle trainer facing a HDMI monitor that gets its audio/visual signal from a Raspberry Pi 5. Note, the fans are present to drive sweat away from my bike’s bottom bracket. A Raspberry Pi 5 is an inexpensive, commercially available computer that I can hold in in one hand. The rear wheel of my bike has a Wahoo speed sensor.

CanaKit’s Raspberry Pi 5 and the Wahoo speed sensor allowed Todd to make the necessary modifications for his bicycle flight simulator.

The sensor’s signals are gathered by software I modified for the Raspberry Pi 5 and translated into a joystick throttle position. That joystick appears like a conventional joystick (with a throttle axis) to FlightGear, a free program that can be installed with the Pi 5’s software manager. The modified software that generates the joystick signal is posted on my GitHub.

For me, having fun by playing a flight simulator while riding a bike trainer maintains or builds my aerobic and mental abilities. The challenge is matching my aerobic capacity with the mental challenge of playing a flight simulator with real-world weather and terrain for nearly daily flights/workouts

Screenshots from Todd’s flight simulator software.

Here is link to a video of the screen I watch when on my bike trainer.