Compatibility with NordicTrack RW600 USB OTG

[Blu2greenCheez]

Greetings all!

Short story long... I bought a used NordicTrack RW600 a few months ago. From what the seller told me, all it needed was a new power supply to get it up and running. Looking back, I made a very dumb move by not finding a compatible power supply first and bringing it with me to test whether the console powered on or even worked. After much disassembly, I discovered that the on-board computer had a nice brown molten stain where one of the bits near the 12v power input from the controller board had forcibly expelled its magic smoke.

Since I'm too cheap to buy a $400+ console for a used rower for which I paid less than half that, I found out about OpenRowingMonitor. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ that was hiding in my home office closet to see if it will work with the RW600. I bought a 7" touchscreen from MicroCenter for the Pi, and I'm ready to make this happen. Already installed the latest version of this package on a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS Lite 32-bit. So far, so good.

Questions for the audience of experts here... Is it possible to use the USB-OTG (mini-USB) to send data to OpenRowingMonitor? Also, how would I go about connecting the keypad used to adjust resistance?

Thanks so much in advance!

[JaapvanEkris]

As NordicTrack in its brilliance has decided to re-use the RW600 for multiple (totally different) machines, I'm curious what machine you bought.

As I started on this project to get rid of the crappy monitor from NordicTrack I can tell you: NordicTrack's monitor is not worth $400, nor is it worth $40. Its metrics are complete BS and the monitor can't connect to any other apps than their own.

The NordicTrack machines I know have a simple reed switch inside their flywheel housing. I hooked it up to the appropriate pins and the Raspberry Pi can do what it needs to do. But I can't find the exploded view for your machine to confirm that.

Their approach of "resistance" shows how little they actually understand from rowing machines. It is called dragfactor by the rest of the world, and rowers agree it is a personal setting that shouldn't chance at all unless for extremely rare trainings. It affects stroke timing, and not really the resistance. Some clubs and national teams actually prescribe DF130 on a Concept2 as it is closest to their boats. So you might go for a static setting here.

ORM can handle a changing DF with ease. On my NordicTrack I had a huge lever which controlled it. ORM sees the change in flywheel behaviour and will adjust the DF automatically. But I'm not sure your machine is capable of changing DF without some electric signal. On the other hand, it usually is simple electronics.