Oh man.

Spent $700 on a new computer then spent $30 on a lengthy HDMI cable so I could get all the computer, cables, and signals going where they needed to go and needed to be.

I've been coding at the thing for two days. I keep getting bizarre terminal errors, where things inexplicably stop working, or my program refuses to respond to commands, or where the program completely refuses to register signals coming from the bike.

Here's some knowledge for you. Unix operating systems treat everything as files. Even weird things, like hard drives, screens, video cards, devices that aren't really files like you're used to. It makes some sense to treat them in this way. After all, all you really need to know in a computer is where a "place" is in the computer, either in memory, or otherwise. Reading and writing from a file is based on the same principal as reading and writing to a screen, or the mouse, or a keyboard.

Except when you use things wrong. Horribly wrong.

Long story short, I had stuff misconfigured. I had my exercise program running, then opening up and treating the device that represented the terminal I was working in as the exercise bike. This means all sorts of weird things... but essentially, it didn't work.

Note to self: /dev/ttys00* are not serial devices.