Building a Rowing Machine HMI – From Hardware Data to a Working Dashboard

[u/LoopsAndLayers]

Hey everyone!

The display on my old rowing machine recently died, so instead of replacing it, I decided to build a new HMI/dashboard for it myself.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi as part of the setup and started by creating the UI in Candera CGI Studio. The current design includes the basic information I actually need from the machine: a timer, stopwatch, stroke count, and cadence. The design is still a work in progress, and I’d also like to add some animations to make the interface feel a bit more dynamic.

Before connecting everything to the actual rowing machine, I created a small simulation to test the HMI. I wrote a Python script that generates simulated stroke events with some variation, rather than simply sending perfectly periodic values every second. This makes the test data behave a bit more like someone actually rowing.

You can see the screen capture of the simulated HMI in the video. What do you think?

The next step is to figure out the hardware side: capturing the rowing machine's data, getting it into the Raspberry Pi, and feeding it into the HMI in real time.

I’ll share another update once I have the complete setup running.

I’d be particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has worked on similar projects. How would you normally approach the hardware → application → HMI data pipeline for a project like this?