The ring shown on someone's index finger

The ErgO Ring Makes Computer Interactions Comfortable

July 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 6 Comments

[Sophia Dai] brings us a project you will definitely like if you’re tired of traditional peripherals like a typical keyboard and mouse combo. This is ErgO, a smart ring you can build out of a few commonly available breakouts, and it keeps a large number of features within a finger’s reach. The project has got an IMU, a Pimoroni trackball, and a good few buttons to perform actions or switch modes, and it’s powered by a tiny Bluetooth-enabled devboard so it can seamlessly perform HID device duty.

While the hardware itself appears to be in a relatively early state, there’s no shortage of features, and the whole experience looks quite polished. Want to lay back in your chair yet keep scrolling the web, clicking through links as you go? This ring lets you do that, no need to hold your mouse anymore, and you can even use it while exercising. Want to do some quick text editing on the fly? That’s also available; the ErgO is designed to be used for day to day tasks, and the UX is thought out well. Want to use it with more than just your computer? There is a device switching feature. The build instructions are quite respectable, too – you can absolutely build one like this yourself, just get a few breakouts, a small battery, some 3D printed parts, and find an evening to solder them all together. All code is on GitHub, just like you would expect from a hack well done.

Looking for a different sort of ring? We’ve recently featured a hackable cheap smart ring usable for fitness tracking – this one is a product that’s still being reverse-engineered, but it’s alright if you’re okay with only having an accelerometer and a few optical sensors.

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A closeup of the ring, inner electronics including a lit green LED seen through the inner transparent epoxy, next to the official app used to light up the LED for a demo.

New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring

June 16, 2024 by Arya Voronova 35 Comments

We’ve seen prolific firmware hacker [Aaron Christophel] tackle smart devices of all sorts, and he never fails to deliver. This time, he’s exploring a device that seems like it could have come from the pages of a Cyberpunk RPG manual — a shiny chrome Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) smart ring that’s packed with sensors, is reasonably hacker friendly, and is currently selling for as little as $20.

The ring’s structure is simple — the outside is polished anodized metal, with the electronics and battery carefully laid out along the inside surface, complete with a magnetic charging port. It has a BLE-enabled MCU, a heartrate sensor, and an accelerometer. It’s not much, but you can do a lot with it, from the usual exercise and sleep tracking, to a tap-sensitive interface for anything you want to control from the palm of your hand. In the video’s comments, someone noted how a custom firmware for the ring could be used to detect seizures; a perfect example of how hacking such gadgets can bring someone a brighter future.

The ring manufacturer’s website provides firmware update images, and it turns out, you can upload your own firmware onto it over-the-air through BLE. There’s no signing, no encryption — this is a dream device for your purposes. Even better, the MCU is somewhat well-known. There’s an SDK, for a start, and a datasheet which describes all you would want to know, save for perhaps the tastiest features. It’s got 200 K of RAM, 512 K of flash, BLE library already in ROM, this ring gives you a lot to wield for how little space it all takes up. You can even get access to the chip’s Serial Wire Debug (SWD) pads, though you’ve got to scrape away some epoxy first.

As we’ve seen in the past, once [Aaron] starts hacking on these sort of devices, their popularity tends to skyrocket. We’d recommend ordering a couple now before sellers get wise and start raising prices. While we’ve seen hackers build their own smart rings before, it’s tricky business, and the end results usually have very limited capability. The potential for creating our own firmware for such an affordable and capable device is very exciting — watch this space!

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A milled PCB next to a woman wearing a dress that includes it

Elegant Evening Dress Sports Servo-Actuated Flowers

April 12, 2023 by Robin Kearey 13 Comments

There’s been plenty of research into “smart fabrics”, and we’ve seen several projects involving items of clothing with electronics integrated inside. These typically include sensors and simple actuators like LEDS, but there’s no reason you can’t integrate moving electromechanical systems as well. [Rehana Al-Soltane] did just that: she made an elegant evening dress with flowers that open and close on command.

It took [Rehana] a bit of experimentation to figure out a floral design that opens and closes smoothly without crumpling the fabric or requiring excessive force to actuate. She finally settled on a plastic sheet sandwiched between two layers of fabric, with pieces of fishing line attached that pull the edges inward. The lines are guided through a tube down the back of the dress, where a servo pulls or releases them.

The mechanical flower can be operated by touch — [Rehana] made one of the other flowers conductive by embedding copper tape between its petals and connected it to the capacitive touch sensor interface of an Atmel microcontroller. The micro is sitting on a custom PCB that’s worn on the hip, with wires going to the servo at the back. You can see how the system operates in the video embedded below.

The dress is [Rehana]’s final project for the famous “How To Make (almost) Anything” course at MIT, and required a wide variety of skills: the cable guide was 3D printed, the flower petals were laser cut, the PCB was milled, and the end product was sewn together. [Rehana] has a knack for making electronics-infused clothes and accessories, including the flexible PCB crown that she’s wearing in the image above. Continue reading “Elegant Evening Dress Sports Servo-Actuated Flowers” →

TshWatch Helps You Learn More About Yourself

April 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 13 Comments

TshWatch is a project by [Ivan / @pikot] that he’s been working on for the past two years. [Ivan] explains that he aims to create a tool meant to help you understand your body’s state. Noticing when you’re stressed, when you haven’t moved for too long, when your body’s temperature is elevated compared to average values – and later, processing patterns in yourself that you might not be consciously aware of. These are far-reaching goals that commercial products only strive towards.

At a glance it might look like a fitness tracker-like watch, but it’s a sensor-packed logging and measurement wearable – with a beautiful E-Ink screen and a nice orange wristband, equipped with the specific features he needs, capturing the data he’d like to have captured and sending it to a server he owns, and teaching him a whole new world of hardware – the lessons that he shares with us. He takes us through the design process over these two years – now on the fifth revision, with first three revisions breadboarded, the fourth getting its own PCBs and E-Ink along with a, and the fifth now in the works, having received some CAD assistance for battery placement planning. At our request, he has shared some pictures of the recent PCBs, too!

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PCB Mill Turns Out Stylish Necklace

April 7, 2020 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

When needing a custom PCB, most of us will whip up design files and send them off to a board house. Prices are low and turnaround times are bearable, with quality that’s difficult to replicate at home. The old methods still have some value however, as [Bantam Tools] demonstrate with this attractive glowing hummingbird necklace.

The back side of the pendant neatly hides a button cell battery and a small SMD switch.

The necklace is made of copper-clad board, the type typically used by those who would etch their own PCBs at home. In this case, the board is placed on a [Bantam Tools] mill, which removes copper strategically and cuts out the final shape. This creates a series of traces on the back for a battery, LEDs and a small swtich, while creating areas on the other side of the board for light to shine through.

With a battery installed, the LEDs on the back side of the necklace glow through the fiberglass for a beautiful effect. With a PCB mill and a reflow oven, it’s remarkably easy to make, too. Of course, if you like your parts density a little higher, these FPGA earrings might be more your speed!

Hair Is Good Electronic Hub Real Estate

September 26, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

When it comes to wearables, there are a few places you can mount rechargeable batteries and largish circuit boards. Certainly, badges hanging from a lanyard are a favorite here on Hackaday. A belt is another option. [deshipu] has come up with a good location on your head, provided you have long hair that is. That’s the hair clasp or barrette. It can support a hefty mass, be relatively large, and doesn’t touch your skin.

His plan gets even better, namely to use it as a hub for other electronics on your head, giving as examples: mechatronic ears and LEDs on eyelashes, earrings, and neck collars. We’d include some sort of heads-up display on glasses too or perhaps some playful glasses windshield wipers.

Being able to solder the clasp to the circuit board was his first success and he’s since made a test barrette with pulsing LEDs which he’s distributed to others for evaluation. We really like his electronic hub idea and look forward to seeing where he takes it. For now, he’s done enough to have become a finalist in the Hackaday Human Computer Interface Challenge.

ETextile Spring Break Tackles Signal Blocking, Audio Generation, And Radio Transmissions

April 20, 2018 by Lara Grant 12 Comments

Finding a killer application for e-textiles is the realm of the hacker and within that realm, anything goes. Whether it’s protecting your digital privacy with signal shielding, generating audio with a wearable BeagleBone or 555 timer, or making your favorite garment into an antenna, the eTextile Spring Break is testing out ways to combine electronics and fabric.

You may be asking yourself “What are e-textiles good for?”. Well, that’s an excellent question and likely the most common one facing the industry today. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give a definitive answer. As an e-textile practitioner, I too am constantly posing this question to myself. There’s an inherently personal nature to fabric worn on the body and to our electronic devices that makes this answer elusive. Instead of trying to fabricate some narrow definition, what I offer is a look at topics of interest, material experimentation, and technical exploration through the lens of a week-long event held recently in New York called eTextile Spring Break.

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