For the past few months my wife has been hinting at wanting one of the SoulCycle At-Home Bikes. Now, ethics of the company aside I find these types of devices to be generally unappealing. Let me get this straight, you want me to pay $2,500 for a bike that you will likely stop supporting within the next few years, or sooner.
Recently though I have found myself getting more and more interested in being able to use Zwift at home. If you are not familiar, Zwift is an online cycling game that allows you to ride and compete in a virtual world. I did a bit of research and was able to see that the SoulCycle bike had the requisite hardware (power and cadence meters) necessary to work out of the box with Zwift. The main issue was how do you get Zwift to display on the same tablet as the SoulCycle app.
After doing some research I was able to find that there appears to be a community of folks in the Peleton community who have been side-loading apps on their Peleton devices for years. I was semi-confident that the same thing could be done on the SoulCycle bike with a bit of trial and error.
Last week I ran across an amazing bargain on a brand new SoulCycle bike that someone was getting rid of.
One I got the bike home I reached out to a few communities to see if anyone had been able to get into the developer settings on the bike before. It turns out that when you call for support on the bike customer support has you click below the camera and hold for 10 seconds. This then sends you to a view that prompts for a passcode. There you enter 69914891 and you are directed to a developer menu.
From this developer menu you can launch a browser, or view Android Settings for the device. Once I was able to launch the browser I installed APKPure on the device. At this point you can install pretty much any Android app you would like. For myself, I installed Airscreen and then used it to mirror Zwift from my mac to the bike display (I had intended to install Zwift directly on the device, but the rendering was soooo slow that I had to come up with an alternative).
I hope some other SoulCyclonaut out there is able to use this guide to make some progress in unlocking the full potential of their purchased hardware.
- Nick