Unlocking the Potential of Cheap Hardware
This open source Python client retrieves real-time data from the COLMI R02 Smart Ring's sensors so it can be incorporated into new projects.
Inexpensive electronic devices, of the sort commonly found on sites like AliExpress, can be a lot of fun to play with. But the hacking potential of their hardware often outweighs the benefits of any intended use cases. Let’s be honest — a lot of corners are cut by the device manufacturers to keep costs down. And those cuts are likely to be in areas like supporting software, which makes certain devices clunky to use, or even artificially limits what can be done with them.
Hardware hacker Wesley Ellis has been playing with the COLMI R02 Smart Ring, which has garnered a lot of attention lately due to its low price tag and a number of reverse engineering efforts targeted at the device. To make the smart ring more useful, and much easier to integrate into other projects, Ellis has developed an open source Python client that can read data produced by the COLMI R02’s onboard sensors.
The smart rings can be purchased for under $20, and come equipped with an accelerometer as well as heart rate and blood oxygen sensors in a compact and attractive package. The ring also has a Bluetooth transceiver, and by using Ellis’ Python utility, one can easily retrieve measurements from these sensors wirelessly in real-time by running a command line utility.
This project is still a work in progress. Many types of measurements can be retrieved with it, and the behavior of the ring can even be modified in subtle ways. But there are still future plans to retrieve additional data, like sleep tracking logs and blood oxygen measurements from the device, which is not yet available.
If you would like to help take this open source project to the next level, Ellis has shared some details about the ring's communication protocol and the structure of data packets. Between that and the previous work that has gone into reverse engineering this smart ring, some interesting hacks are certainly possible. And if you do build something new, be sure to post the project to Hackster so that we can all drool over it!
