Working Out at Home? Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into a Personal Trainer

(Image credit: James Wong)

If you're stuck at home and can't make it to the gym, this Raspberry Pi project has got you covered! This week, James Wong shared a creative Pi project called HIIT Pi, and it’s guaranteed to help you work up a sweat. It uses a Raspberry Pi to track your movements and give feedback on the accuracy of your workout.

Working out alone can be hard—especially if you're new to a specific exercise. This project alleviates the burden of uncertainty and provides a bit of guidance for your home routine.

(Image credit: James Wong)

The Raspberry Pi uses a camera module to record input. Each frame is parsed and checked with TensorFlow Lite, which uses machine learning to estimate the accuracy of your current pose. Feedback is reported in real time at 30 frames per second.

Not every exercise is easy to track, and issues can arise if the camera is angled improperly. As of right now, the project supports just a handful of basic exercises: push-ups, toe taps and jumping jacks. But with a little fine-tuning, a maker could add more exercises, which is part of the creator's plan.

To read more about this project and how it works, check out the official HIIT PI Github page. You can also follow Wong on his website for more HIIT PI project updates.

Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer at Tom's Hardware US. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.