Flopped Humane “AI Pin” Gets An Experimental SDK

June 19, 2025 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

The Humane AI Pin was ambitious, expensive, and failed to captivate people between its launch and shutdown shortly after. While the units do contain some interesting elements like the embedded projector, it’s all locked down tight, and the cloud services that tie it all together no longer exist. The devices technically still work, they just can’t do much of anything.

The Humane AI Pin had some bold ideas, like an embedded projector. (Image credit: Humane)

Since then, developers like [Adam Gastineau] have been hard at work turning the device into an experimental development platform: PenumbraOS, which provides a means to allow “untrusted” applications to perform privileged operations.

As announced earlier this month on social media, the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. [Adam] stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.

When the Humane AI Pin launched, it aimed to compete with smartphones but failed to impress much of anyone. As a result, things folded in record time. Humane’s founders took jobs at HP and buyers were left with expensive paperweights due to the highly restrictive design.

Thankfully, a load of reverse engineering has laid the path to getting some new life out of these ambitious devices. The project could sure use help from anyone willing to pitch in, so if that’s up your alley be sure to join the project; you’ll be in good company.

The bill of materials and the assembled smartwatch.

Piko, Your ESP32 Powered Fitness Buddy

June 5, 2025 by John Elliot V 3 Comments

Over on Hackaday.io there’s a fun and playful write-up for a fun and playful project — the Piko, an ESP32 powered smartwatch.

Our hackers [Iloke Alusala], [Lulama Lingela], and [Rafael Cardoso] teamed up to design and manufacture this wrist-worn fitness wearable. Made from an ESP32 Beetle C6 and using an attached accelerometer with simple thresholds the Piko can detect if you’re idle, walking, jogging, or sprinting; and at the same time count your steps.

The team 3D printed the requisite parts in PLA using the printer in their university makerspace. In addition to the ESP32 and printed parts, the bill of materials includes a 240×240 IPS TFT LCD display, a LIS331HH triple-axis accelerometer, a 200 mAh battery, and of course, a watch strap.

Demonstrating splendid attention to detail, and inspired by the aesthetic of the Tamagotchi and pixel art, the Piko mimics your current activity with a delightful array of hand-drawn animations on its display. Should you want to bring a similar charm to your own projects, all the source is available under the MIT license.

If you’re interested in smartwatch technology be sure to check out our recent articles: Smartwatches Could Flatten The Curve Of The Next Pandemic and Custom Smartwatch Makes Diabetes Monitoring Easier For Kids.

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A Dual Mirror System For Better Cycling Safety

May 1, 2025 by Donald Papp 54 Comments

Rear-view mirrors are important safety tools, but [Mike Kelly] observed that cyclists (himself included) faced hurdles to using them effectively. His solution? A helmet-mounted dual-mirror system he’s calling the Mantis Mirror that looks eminently DIY-able to any motivated hacker who enjoys cycling.

One mirror for upright body positions, the other for lower positions.

Carefully placed mirrors eliminate blind spots, but a cyclist’s position changes depending on how they are riding and this means mirrors aren’t a simple solution. Mirrors that are aligned just right when one is upright become useless once a cyclist bends down. On top of that, road vibrations have a habit of knocking even the most tightly-cinched mirror out of alignment.

[Mike]’s solution was to attach two small mirrors on a short extension, anchored to a cyclist’s helmet. The bottom mirror provides a solid rear view from an upright position, and the top mirror lets one see backward when in low positions.

[Mike] was delighted with his results, and got enough interest from others that he’s considering a crowdfunding campaign to turn it into a product. In the meantime, we’d love to hear about it if you decide to tinker up your own version.

You can learn all about the Mantis Mirror in the video below, and if you want to see the device itself a bit clearer, you can see that in some local news coverage.

Continue reading “A Dual Mirror System For Better Cycling Safety” →

Windows On ARM On Arm

April 10, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

While some companies like Apple have gone all-in on the ARM architecture, others are more hesitant to dive into the deep end. For example, Microsoft remains heavily invested in the x86 architecture and although it does have some ARM offerings, a lot of them feel a bit half-baked. So you might question why someone like [Gustave] has spent so much time getting Windows to run on unusual ARM platforms. But we don’t need much of a reason to do something off-the-wall like that around these parts, so take a look at his efforts to get Windows for ARM running on a smartwatch.

The smartwatch in question here is a Pixel Watch 3, which normally runs a closed-source Android implementation called Wear OS. The bootloader can be unlocked, so [Gustave] took that approach to implement a few clever workarounds to get Windows to boot including adding UEFI to the watch. During the process Google updated these devices to Android 15, though, which broke some of these workarounds. The solution at that point was to fake a kernel header and re-implement UEFI and then load Windows (technically Windows PE) onto the watch.

Although this project was released on April 1, and is by [Gustave]’s own admission fairly ridiculous and not something he actually recommends anyone do, he does claim that it’s real and provides everything needed for others to run Windows on their smartwatches if they want to. Perhaps one of our readers will be brave enough to reproduce the results and post about it in the comments. In the meantime, there are a few more open options for smartwatches available if you’re looking for something to tinker with instead.

Thanks to [Ruhan] for the tip!

Make DIY Conductive, Biodegradable String Right In Your Kitchen

March 28, 2025 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

[ombates] shares a step-by-step method for making a conductive bio-string from scratch, no fancy equipment required. She demonstrates using it to create a decorative top with touch-sensitive parts, controlling animations on an RGB LED pendant. To top it off, it’s even biodegradable!

The string is an alginate-based bioplastic that can be made at home and is shaped in a way that it can be woven or knitted. Alginate comes primarily from seaweed, and it gels in the presence of calcium ions. [ombates] relies on this to make a goopy mixture that, once extruded into a calcium chloride bath, forms a thin rubbery length that can be dried into the strings you see here. By adding carbon to the mixture, the resulting string is darkened in color and also conductive.

There’s no details on what the actual resistance of a segment of this string can be expected to measure, but while it might not be suitable to use as wiring it is certainly conductive enough to act as a touch sensor in a manner similar to the banana synthesizer. It would similarly be compatible with a Makey Makey (the original and incredibly popular hardware board for turning household objects into touch sensors.)

What you see here is [ombates]’ wearable demonstration, using the white (non-conductive) string interwoven with dark (conductive) portions connected to an Adafruit Circuit Playground board mounted as an LED pendant, with the conductive parts used as touch sensors.

Alginate is sometimes used to make dental molds and while alginate molds lose their dimensional accuracy as they dry out, for this string that’s not really a concern. If you give it a try, visit our tip line to let us know how it turned out!

Wearable Computing Goes Woven, Wireless, And Washable

March 24, 2025 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

Sometimes we come across a wild idea that really tries to re-imagine things, and re-conceiving wearable computing as a distributed system of “fiber computers” embedded into textiles is definitely that. The research paper presents fully-functional fiber computers and sensors that are washable, weave-able, wireless, and resist both stretching and bending.

The research paper with all the details is behind a paywall at this time, but we’ll summarize the important parts that are likely to get a hacker’s mind working.

Each fiber strand (like the one shown here) is a self-contained system. Multiple fibers can communicate with one another wirelessly to create a network that, when integrated into garments, performs tasks like health and activity monitoring while using very little power. And what’s really interesting about these fibers is their profound lack of anything truly exotic when it comes to their worky bits.

The inner components of a fiber computer are pretty recognizable: each contains a surface-mount microcontroller, LEDs, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) radio, light sensor, temperature sensor, accelerometer, and photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for measuring blood volume changes through skin. Power is supplied by a separate segment containing a tiny cylindrical lithium-polymer battery, with a simple plug connector. It’s a tiny battery, but the system is so low-power that it still provides hours of operation.

If there’s a secret sauce, it’s in the fabrication. The first step is stretching a system into a long, thin circuit. Each component is nested onto a small piece of flex PCB that acts a little like a breakout board, and that flex PCB gets rolled around each component to make as tiny a package as possible. These little payloads are connected to one another by thin wires, evenly spaced to form a long circuit. That circuit gets (carefully!) sealed into a thermoformed soft polymer and given an overbraid, creating a fiber that has a few lumps here and there but is nevertheless remarkably thin and durable. The result can be woven into fabrics, worn, washed, bent, and in general treated like a piece of clothing.

Closeups of components that make up a single strand of “fiber computer”.

Multiple fibers are well-suited to being woven into clothing in a distributed way, such as one for each limb. Each fiber is self-contained but communicates with its neighbors using a BLE mesh, or transmitting data optically via embedded LEDs and light sensors. Right now, such a distributed system has been shown to be able to perform health monitoring and accurately classify different physical activities.

We’ve seen sensors directly on skin and transmitting power over skin, but this is a clever fusion of conventional parts and unconventional design — wearable computing that’s not just actually wearable and unobtrusive, but durable and even washable.

Pick Up A Pebble Again

March 19, 2025 by Jenny List 38 Comments

A decade ago, smartwatches were an unexplored avenue full of exotic promise. There were bleeding-edge and eye-wateringly expensive platforms from the likes of Samsung or Apple, but for the more experimental among technophiles there was the Pebble. Based on a microcontroller and with a relatively low-resolution display, it was the subject of a successful crowdfunding campaign and became quite the thing to have. Now long gone, it has survived in open-source form, and now if you’re a Pebble die-hard you can even buy a new Pebble. We’re not sure about their choice of name though, we think calling something the “Core 2 Duo” might attract the attention of Intel’s lawyers.

The idea is broadly the same as the original, and remains compatible with software from back in the day. New are some extra sensors, longer battery life, and an nRF52840 BLE microcontroller running the show. It certainly captures the original well, however we’re left wondering whether a 2013 experience still cuts it in 2025 at that price. We suspect in that vein it would be the ideal compliment to your game controller when playing Grand Theft Auto V, another evergreen 2013 hit.

We look forward to seeing where this goes, and we reported on the OS becoming open source earlier this year. Perhaps someone might produce a piece of open source hardware to do the same job?