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Turning a Treadmill Into a PS4 Controller So I Exercise

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A broken treadmill just became the strangest PS4 controller ever built.

Los Angeles maker and electrical engineer Allen Pan had a problem familiar to anyone who set a New Year’s resolution and watched it die around “Quitter’s Day” in late January. His fix wasn’t a gym membership — it was rewiring a busted treadmill to double as a game controller, forcing himself to walk and run in real life just to move his character through Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding on PS4. The result, posted to his YouTube channel Sufficiently Advanced under the title “Turning a Treadmill Into a PS4 Controller So I Exercise,” turned into one of the more inventive DIY builds gaming Twitter had seen in a while.

• Pan had already logged nearly 60 hours in Death Stranding, a game built almost entirely around walking, making it the obvious target for a human-powered controller hack.
• Working with fellow maker Peter Sripol, Pan used the treadmill’s own motor as a generator, wiring it through potentiometers and two 24V relays into a gutted knockoff DualShock 4 to replace the left analog stick.
• The build went viral, picked up by Polygon, Hackster.io, and Nerdist, and even drew an acknowledgment from Death Stranding star Norman Reedus on social media.

From Broken Machine to Human-Powered Generator

Pan started with a treadmill that no longer ran on its own power — the belt only moved if someone physically walked on it. His first instinct was to read the belt’s movement through the machine’s magnetic sensor, feeding that signal into an Arduino via a digital potentiometer. That approach didn’t hold up. So Pan and Sripol flipped the problem: instead of trying to sense the motor, they used the motor itself as a generator, spinning up voltage whenever someone stepped on the belt.

That voltage became the input. Walking at a normal pace produced a lower reading; picking up the pace to a run pushed it higher. Pan ran that output through potentiometers and two 24V relays calibrated to trip at specific thresholds, then soldered the relays directly into the disassembled circuit board of a knockoff DualShock 4 controller. The relays effectively replaced the controller’s left analog stick — slow steps registered as an in-game walk, a full sprint on the belt triggered Sam Porter Bridges to sprint on screen.

Keeping the Camera Under Control

A treadmill can push a character forward, but it can’t steer. Pan solved that by keeping the controller’s right analog stick fully functional on a separate handheld piece, letting him manage the camera and direction while his legs handled speed. To sell the illusion further, he strapped into a tethered harness and wore a cargo backpack to mimic protagonist Sam Porter Bridges’ signature delivery gear, treadmill belt doubling as the in-game trail.

A walking simulator walking simulator, AKA the lowest budget VR rig ever.

That line, straight from Pan, sums up the joke and the engineering at the same time. It’s a rig built entirely to make a walking game literally require walking, using nothing more exotic than a dead treadmill, some relays, and a knockoff controller board.

The Payoff — and the Sweat

When Pan actually tested the finished rig, it worked exactly as designed: slow steps for a walk, an all-out run for a sprint, right stick free for steering. It also turned out to be a genuinely exhausting workout, both for Pan and for the friends who took turns on the belt once word got around. That’s the part that made the project land beyond the maker community — it wasn’t just a clever hack, it solved the actual problem Pan set out to fix, tricking himself into cardio by making it the only way to keep playing.

The clip spread quickly through gaming and tech coverage, picked up by outlets like Polygon, Hackster.io, and Nerdist, and it even got a nod from Norman Reedus, who plays Sam Porter Bridges in Death Stranding. For a project built around a broken treadmill and a knockoff controller, that’s a long way to travel.

Pan’s channel has built a track record of exactly this kind of build-it-to-prove-a-point engineering, and this one lands in the same lane as the wilder gaming gadgets covered elsewhere in the space — the kind of setup that makes you wonder what a weird gaming rig from Japan would look like next to it, or whether Pan’s treadmill controller could out-suffer a gaming seat that took three days to assemble. Given how many hours he’d already sunk into Death Stranding, it’s fair to guess Pan will find another game worth building a controller around — the next question is just how much sweat that one will cost him.