Short tip: Control King Smith WalkingPad with QWalkingPad

I have owned a foldable King Smith WalkingPad R1 Pro treadmill for the home office for some time now. This is controlled with a remote control via BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). Unfortunately, this seems to consume quite a lot of power - at least the CR2032 battery in my treadmill always runs out after a short time.

Since I always use the treadmill when I'm at the computer anyway, I can also control it via the computer. With QWalkingPad there is a Qt-based utility for exactly this purpose.

Since it is not part of my Linux distribution (Fedora), I had to compile it as follows:

1# dnf install cmake qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtconnectivity-devel
2$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/DorianRudolph/QWalkingPad.git
3$ mkdir build && cd build
4$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE
5$ make -j

The program requires the ID of the BLE module, which can be found out using toolBLEx, for example - the tool is also available as Flatpak.

Then qwalkingpad can access the device, view current metrics and control the treadmill:

The next step would be to develop a suitable GNOME shell extension for it... 🤔