GoKawiilI use Strava for the obvious stuff, like runs, HIIT classes, and the occasional commute that goes full workout when I’m desperate to get my steps in. I’m not a pet owner, but I can understand a dog walk making it on there, too. The dog may be involved, but at least you’re still the one doing the walking.
But workouts uploaded from a hamster wheel? That feels like new territory.
Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, recently posted on Reddit that he built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie’s own Strava account . Mollie, his 10-month-old hamster, is now committed to logging nightly runs with distance, pace, and time.
One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes. The next night, Mollie logged 5.55 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes.
At first, de Buck just wanted to know how much distance Mollie was covering after dark.
“I bought a very cheap bicycle computer pretty much right away,” he told Runner’s World.
That worked at first, because the bike computer also used a magnet and sensor. But there was one very hamster-specific problem to deal with, as the sensor would shift into standby mode once Mollie stopped running for more than five minutes.
“So if Mollie would take a lunch break at 1 a.m., we’d have no idea how far he’d have run after that,” de Buck said.
The bike computer also only gave him total distance, and that just wasn’t going to cut it. De Buck wanted the full Strava treatment because apparently even hamsters deserve splits, uploads, and post-run analysis.
The build itself is clever, but the basic idea is simple. As de Buck explains it, a magnet on the wheel passes a hall sensor, which detects each rotation. An ESP32—basically a tiny programmable computer—keeps track of the data overnight. In the morning, he says a script on his laptop collects the information, turns it into a Strava-compatible .FIT file, and uploads the activity through the Strava API.
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