Fight-or-flight Triggering Workout Device
Made by terence-grover / Fitness / Health / Sports / Wearables
About the project
A game device designed to improve the user's pull-ups through the power of fight-or-flight response, if you can't beat the pull-up highscore, you get tazed... hard.
Project info
Difficulty: Moderate
Platforms: Espressif, Soldered Electronics
Estimated time: 1 day
License: GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL3+)
Items used in this project
Hardware components
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Hand tools and fabrication machines
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Drill with wood drillbits | x 1 | |
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Plywood | x 1 | |
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Screws | x 1 | |
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L Brackets | x 1 | |
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"Running" phone holder pouch | x 1 | |
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Wood Saw | x 1 | |
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Hot glue gun | x 1 | |
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Primer+Paint | x 1 |
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Story
Most fitness gadgets promise motivation. Mine threatens electrocution.
The Pull-Up Trainer is a custom workout system I built around a simple idea: if you can’t keep up, you get shocked. The setup combines a bar-mounted game with wearable punishment hardware, pushing pull-ups into the world of interactive torture devices.
At its core, the system uses:
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ESP32 (controller) – runs the game logic and communicates wirelessly.
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4 large LED arcade buttons – mounted above the bar. They light up in randomized patterns, turning your pull-up into a fast-reaction mini-game.
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Relays + 12V battery pack – drive the arcade buttons/relays and on-board esp-32 + logic
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Wearable shock module (ESP32-based) – strapped to the unlucky player. Connected to the main unit wirelessly via ESP-Now, it administers a short zap whenever the player misses a button cue.
The software side is kept lean: the ESP32 listens for button inputs, keeps score, and syncs with the wearable over ESP-Now. Relays control the arcade buttons’ LEDs and input states. Timing windows are intentionally brutal, because fitness is suffering.
Design-wise, this project sits at the intersection of fitness gamification and bad ideas. It’s built to look slick enough to pass as a "serious" trainer, but underneath, it’s really a chaotic arcade machine haphazardly stuck onto gym equipment. The punishment loop creates a unique kind of motivation—you don’t just fight gravity, you fight electricity.
What started as a joke quickly became an engaging build. It taught me a lot about relay timing, wireless latency, and the surprising resilience of human skin. Would I recommend using it daily? Probably not. But as a cursed prototype, it’s the most shocking way to train your pull-ups.
Schematics, diagrams and documents
Code
Credits
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