The Hacker Ring

I don’t usually shop for things on TikTok, but in the case of my most recent technology purchase, I was willing to make an exception.

Here’s why. Recently, a story blew up in Hacker News-land that helped to draw attention to a piece of mass-manufactured junk with a superpower. That superpower: It was smart, cheap, and easy to reverse-engineer.

The Colmi R02 smart ring is capable of tracking things like blood oxygen, sleep habits, step count, and heart rate, but does so in a non-proprietary way. The secret to this Chinese-made ring is that it uses Bluetooth Low Energy connections, but more importantly, it uses a relatively common system-on-chip, the BlueX RF03. It’s capable of accepting over-the-air updates, and not just from Colmi’s own apps. If you speak the SoC’s language, you can talk to it.

This was all figured out a few months ago by a guy named Aaron Christophel, who specializes in hacking cheap smart devices. One of the nice things about this ring is that, because it’s been effectively reverse engineered already, you can build your own software for it to access the data it’s grabbing.

(There is also a Python-based script that connects to this thing that I tried, but it drained the battery in a matter of minutes. So maybe I’ll leave that part to the actual hackers for now.)

I spent maybe $30 on the ring plus shipping, and I gotta say—it is a great deal for what you get. I have heard that the rings run a bit small, but other than having to buy the ring on TikTok because Amazon and eBay didn’t have my size, it fits fine and it wears about as well as my normal ring does.

The innards of the ring are visible on the outside, which is what made it relatively easy to reverse-engineer. (photo by me)

Some thoughts about this thing as an actual ring:

The plus sides: For what you’re paying, you get a lot. My favorite all-time fitness-tracker doo-hickey was the Jawbone Up, which packed a bunch of tracking elements into a wearable band, and did so without really standing out or trying to grab your attention. (We have enough things shouting in our general direction.) Smart rings appeal to me as they offer this same functionality, except even more stealthily.

The downsides: In the dark, the finger-scanning features, conducted every half-hour or so, are very noticeable, which inevitably leads to questions in social situations. It would be nice if there was a notifications/vibration functionality, but honestly, it’s not necessary for the price. Also, I have had some issues with it tracking sleep. There’s no way for me to tell it to turn on as soon as I pass out; it has to guess, and sometimes, it guesses wrong.

But I think the part that really makes me think it’s the bee’s knees, even if it misses an occasional night’s rest, is the fact that I can use a locally-hosted app to track this stuff. See, the nightly version of the Android app GadgetBridge, an application that downloads actually supports this thing, and lets me track all this info locally, so I don’t need to share my data with Google, Apple, or anyone else if I don’t want to. And I don’t need to share it with Colmi, either.

Not that anyone is going to be tracking my health data, but that is definitely a feature, not a bug.

I think a lot about that Jawbone device—I mentioned it earlier this year when I wrote about the Rabbit R1. As you might remember, the company that created it completely sank, after getting rid of its cool design. But the thing is, they did so in a way that put these height-of-cool devices under lock and key, making them functionally impossible to relive.

I am not saying that this metal-plated loop of epoxy-covered hardware is by any means as groundbreaking as that original Jawbone device was, but I do think that the fact that, in a decade, this sector has gone from innovation hotbed to cheap commodity without losing very much is a good thing for consumers.

The internet of shit, as the nerds tend to call it, isn’t just shitty because of the technology’s commodity nature, but because the stuff stops working because the cloud features were added out of a desire to stretch ownership beyond the traditional means.

Now, if something becomes popular enough, parts are easy to find. My Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones (which, because I’m a smart shopper, I got basically new from ShopGoodwill.com for a third of the asking price) are so popular that I was able to replace the ear cups with aftermarket parts a couple of months ago. And I can replace any of the breaking plastic parts, or even the batteries, with parts from eBay whenever I feel it’s time to swap them out. And, when Sony inevitably stops supporting the app for these groundbreaking headphones, GadgetBridge will be right there to pick up their broken pieces.

We need to find devices like the Colmi R02 and celebrate them for what they represent: Electronics built to be trash that turn out to be treasure. Ten years from now, all the other smart rings will inevitably stop working because the company that made them went out of business or they decided it was time for you to upgrade. The Colmi R02 will keep working because I only needed the company that made it for the original transaction.

I’ve got it from here.