Workout equipment LED mod to make it more fun?

[cdev]

I recently found an elliptical cross country skiing exercise machine in perfect working condition being put out for trash. My sweetie and I have a little dolly for moving heavy things and we just walked it home. brought it home and now we are using it daily. It's not the most high end machine, but it does what it is supposed to do, and has a basic digital panel and everything works. Its a great core workout. Now that its getting colder this is really becoming useful. But the digital panel is lacking any connectivity. What I want is to hook it up via wifi or bluetooth to a linux box  on my home network that can display  workouts vs. time in a graph and save them To get a visual feedback aspect and get us to push ourselves more. I plan to save the data in a database table, to see if we are getting better and better. 

The machine is a cheap and generic elliptical trainer, its a Weslo Momentus 750. Its electronics are probably the same as a generic exercise bike, with an odometer, diplay for "distance" traveled, speed, and time since you started working out displayed.

Has anybody else done this?

Since the unit's electronics appears very simple, I am I guess assuming that I should be able to get the data out. What I am asking is has anybody else here done this, and what did you do, and did you have fun with/use it. Since this nice machine literallyfell into our laps we want to use it!

The ultimate output will be to nginx (or more likely zope's own webserver) running on the Pi. I anticipate connecting the Pi to the elliptical machine using a wemos d1 mini or similar cheap wifi enabled microcomputer on the exercise machine, Passing the data to the PI I have a subnet  thats left un connected to the outside and the d1 mini can send messages to the webserver via http over it. The raspberry pi can run a local instance of the zope application server and send the data via attributes in a URL. which zope then handles. It can then be saved or whatever.

This is straightforward, fairly light on resource usage and flexible. ts very easy to process the data using zope and/or pgsql and Python.

Has anybody else done the first part?

I want to make it a bit like  agame, in other words, fun.

Maybe put some RGB LEDs on the "bike" panel area  to provide some visual feedback, maybe go through the spectrum from purple to red as the workout gets more energetic..

 and I am wondering what kind of RGB lighting to use (peoples favorites?) I know zero about available RGB lights to hook upto. But even just simple LEDs would do. Really anything but I want to make it kind of fun, and bring out the competitive aspect of it.

I want to run that off of the D1 mini's cpu and use a couple of NPN power transistors that I have to drive the LEDs. (not buy some thing else.) .

Like most of us I have a zillion unused power bricks in various DC voltages and can use one of them to power this.

Has anybody here done anything like this?