We spotted this odd piece of geek couture on DVICE today. It’s a bracelet that displays incoming calls via Bluetooth and also vibrates. The intended use is kinda interesting, but we wonder what else could be done with it. Could you update it with any text you want by creating fake caller ID messages? You could have your laptop in your backpack and have the bracelet update when it finds an open access point or any other sort of notification. The display shows the word “Connecting” in pictures, but apparently only displays numbers for incoming calls. It also includes a button to reject calls.
Do you have a project that needs a wireless display? Are there other options like this? At $25, this might be worth a try.
pete: Hardware of the revision I have is as follows:
Display:
Controller:
Manufacturer: Solomon Systech (http://www.solomon-systech.com/)
Model: SSD1300T (custom? most probably, but there are datasheets for some that look to be similar)
Panel:
Manufacturer: (Not sure, but I suspect it is sold with the controller attached, and I don’t know if Solomon Systech fabs the panels as well.)
Model: (Nothing that turns up any useful search results – see previous note)
Resolution: 96×16?
Flash:
Manufacturer: Spansion
Model: AL008D70BFI02
Controller/Bluetooth:
Manufacturer: CSR (http://www.csr.com/)
Model: BC417??? (EXT designation, so it uses external Flash – see Notes below)
Notes: The LCD controller could probably be reverse-engineered, if I had access to it directly. The flash is… well, flashable. The problem is the CSR IC. It’s an all-in-one BT/MCU/Charger chip, with absolutely no publicly available information – as I found out, even signing an NDA won’t get you anything useful :/) There board does break out what appears to be (by the labels and the small bit of technical information I could glean) the SPI bus to testpoints. Without the datasheet, I don’t know what type of control is available through that bus. From what I’ve read, there *might* be a way to flash it from if you could get access to the UART, but, having nothing to go on and a really small SMT board, that isn’t practical for me to work on. Even if that worked, I still have no docs on their proprietary pseudo-ASM language, which runs sandboxed on top of a hypervisor of some sort. Oh yeah, and their software is $3000 :/
If anybody has access to useful information on this that they are allowed to disclose, I’d love to hear it. Ideally a custom firmware could be written to transparently pass commands to the display controller over BT/SPP.
I just bought one to use with my iPhone (provided Apple lets me >_>) and the name of the person, rather than the number, would be more useful to me. If only I knew a bit of Objective-C, then I’d have a crack at making this work with the iPhone and several apps on it..
@Ffejery
so what devices did you use to send the hello message to your device?a computer?cellphone?
what i need this to do is vibrate on my wrist when my tomtom navigator sees a red light or speed camera ahead (i ride a motorcycle so i cant hear it beep and its not really safe to have a screen mounted on the bars) anyone know if that would work if it were paired as a headphone?
I think that’d be pretty sick, in my opinion.
I’ll get h4xx1ng when I get one.
GPS
write a custom program that sends other information in the caller id strings through the BT hands free profile and then you should be able to make it display arbitrary strings like tweets, stock quotes, etc, etc.
Like the idea and like the style, but I have no idea what I would use it for. Stock quotes (mentioned above) or alerts (in the article) would be good.
I am a 40 something business owner and know of so many business applications for a “silent” simple text device like this it isn’t funny. For those of you pooh poohing this with your childish banter, step aside because some people on this forum are onto something. The apps are mind boggling to me.
Like the idea and like the style, but I have no idea what I would use it for. Stock quotes (mentioned above) or alerts (in the article) would be good.
I just got one from a webshop and my opinion of the product is same as allmost any others; the number of the caller is pretty unusefull information because no-one types numbers for calling anymore and therefore no-one remembers them. So the name of the caller would be crucial.
Im not a programmer of anykind, but I got a few ideas to make a whole lot better product.
When you connect the bracelet to your mobile, it says the name of the device ie. Jives iPhone, so would it be possible to code a program for the iphone, wich works as a “gateway” for the bracelet and translates different information to the same language? Theres a freeware software for mac users to code IOs applications, but that you probably allready knew.
The bracelet have only two buttons, so acording to that, my idea of the design would go like this:
– different information sits on different pages and to change the page you push the button.
– first page is the time
– second page would be missed calls
– third for sms/email messages. Not the whole message, but only information if there´s any.
– fourth scrolls the rss feed
– fifth shows the current weather conditions
– etc.
– bracelet would automatically go to the first page, after a certain period of time.
Please notify me if theres anyone still working on this?
hello,
I have a similiar braclet, but without the display, and I have to control it with my computer (so that it vibrates when I want it to). I dont have much knowlege on this things so can anyone give me some guidelines how to do it, where could I get drivers for my computer to work with the braclet etc..?
Thaks..