Either sell the ring and include lifetime membership for free like Garmin [0], or _lease/rent_ the device on contract and charge a monthly fee. Don't do both
The Oura starts at $469 CAD [1] plus $7.99 CAD per month [2].
[0]: https://connect.garmin.com/
[1]: https://ouraring.com/product/rings/oura-ring-4/silver
[2]: https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052018753-...
An example of something similar is quip¹'s subscription, you buy the toothbrush and subscribing to the refill plan gets you a "lifetime"² warranty
1: getquip.com
2: lifetime of the subscription
The buy-once, upgrade-years model puts too much risk on the developer. Which in turn results in lousy experiences for customers (dropped support for software, loss in value of hardware on the second hand market). I actually bought an iOS app twice because I found it crazy to be able to use the same €5-app as a baby monitor for over a decade. That is probably a single developer churning out features at a low pace, but continuously for a big part of a career.
Also, aside from some very specific and new instances, car maintenance has not been provided solely by the manufacturer or authorized dealers.
Also Oura isn't all that accurate. For anyone who is interested in the wearable space I HIGHLY reccomend The Quantified Scientist[0] on Youtube. He does his best to compare wearable accuracy with real medical devices or other proven devices.
Im eagerly awaiting a ring sleep tracker like it which can be used offline with gadgetbridge or something.
I wasnt expecting the colmi to be accurate for this low price, but still.
For gadgetbridge I dont think there are any good sleep trackers and the only two I know of that are genuinely accurate are the apple watch and oura (theres a guy who tests them all on youtube - this is what he found).
Id happily pay extra for a decent non-apple local storage only fitness tracker which integrates with OSS and doesnt upload every heartbeat to the cloud but it does not seem to exist.
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist
While I still love the ring form factor. As tacky as it sounds, I still wear my bricked Oura rings sometimes just because I like the feel lol. However, I would never trust Oura ((or any other device outside of Apple(unfortunately)) to gauge you health off their data. While Oura is directionally correct (like most of them), it never once detected low oxygen levels in my sleep and I have some of the worst central sleep apnea my doctor has seen.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niLuR68YleI 2min41sec
What bothers me about these sleep tracking devices is they are often "on the low" reccomended as ways to detect sleep problems like sleep apnea. This might not be done by the companies themselves but it is certainly done by influencers who are hired to promote these products. If someone were to buy an Oura ring because they snore (one of their marketing tactics) to try and see if they have sleep apnea there is a high chance that the app would tell them their oxygen levels are fine and then they'd never go get a sleep study (which cost less than an Oura ring with home kits now). Assuming this caused them to never follow up on that snoring again, Oura's (and other companies) marketing and mediocre tech would quite literally shaved years off this persons life.
When I asked my doc if sleep apnea could kill me if left untreated, he responded, "It WILL kill you if we leave it untreated."
[0]:https://getwellue.com/pages/o2ring-oxygen-monitor
Edit: I do believe in 5 years Oura and other similar products will have figures this out. Just not yet.
Accurate tracking of what? And which smart watches?
The Apple Watch seems to generally have the most accurate tracking according to most studies, which surprises me.
When I was looking at buying an Oura and browsing user subreddits, it was full of complaints about inaccurate readings and the slow intervals between readings.
Your Oura ring will likely get bricked by their updates (they'll replace it, but come on). Or you could simply have a busy week, forget to charge it and ban. Bricked.
They of course were first to market with this form factor, so they of course are going to be the ones to take most of the flack for all the growing pains that come with that. This is typical with any new platform. However, they still leave a ton to be desired and I can't really see how they'll survive the next few years with all the competition in the space.
I have no use for the smart health thingies, which really look like a data driven health gimmicks to me.
NFC on the other hand I could find hundreds of applications, from payment to access and transport cards.
Getting secure tokens (like payment, door unlock, etc) is possible but can be complicated. The ring is a small target, so not always easy to find the received if you're using it with a phone.
Oh, and the software is low level and finickity. I managed to accidentally set mine to read only mode permanently.
Review at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/giving-the-finger-to-mfa-a-...
The NFC tag is a small target, probably because of the size of the antenna, but the RFID one has pretty good range. I got five of those rings, very much recommended if you have stuff to auth to.
So for anything other than systems you control or are good friends with the IT guy for, you're out of luck.
The things is 99.9% of access cards (where I leave at least) are default-encrypted mifare classic, making cloning trivial. Transport cards are an other beast since they have their own backlog and proper encryption, but there are ways.
So all in all, dumping the card is not the issue for me, it's the medium on which to put the clones that is still a question mark.
The "NFC sticker on the back of the phone" is cool because it's almost as if your phone opens the door (stock android won't let me easily swap NFC SC ID), but NFC is fidgety when multiple chips are in close proximity, leading to frequent misses.
I have found multi-chips NFC cards on Ali Express. These are basically a single antenna wired to an array of chips directed by a keypad. That seems viable on paper but you still get to carry the card and press the right switch.
The ideal solution would be a smart ring with a reflashable NFC chip, along with a programmable MCU to implement the rolling logic between cards.
Unfortunately, no.
From my experience at least, most access cards are simple mifare classic cards, and they have no payload: the reader just got a list of allowed card IDs, maintained by the building IT.
While you can freely rewrite mifare data from Android, it won't let you change your ID unless you root your phone. I guess this is similar to the old days where you weren't supposed to change your MAC addresses.
I've also seen some rings on Aliexpress that purport to support the same capabilites, but havent personally tried them out yet.
When aquiantances ask me for recommendations I always tell them to look into Aliexpress over Dangerous Things as they're significantly cheaper, but I've also heard really mixed things about the various offerings on the site.
I've bought from Ali hundreds of times, maybe thousands of items. The quality isn't always great (what can you expect for the price?), but it's very rarely scams.
Stay away from microSD cards, though.
Is there a ring with touch or physical buttons. A clicky wheel would even be better. As display I image multiple discreet RGB-leds, but other option could work as well.
I would be ok with a watch too.
I bought for $20 a bed lamp that comes with led lights, bluetooth receiver, clock and alarm clock, and wireless charging for my iphone. It has a microphone to stream all my conversations god knows where, though its purported purpose is to listen me sing and pulse the lights according to the pitch.
It comes with a convenient app to set the clock and the lights. But due to a glitch in the software, the alarm goes off every night at 01:00 AM. I haven't been able to disable that via their official app; no real programmers were used making that thing. But there probably is a bug in their bluetooth stack that would allow me to become root of the lamp and fix it myself...if I had the time.
I wish hardware makers for off-brand products would include a minimal hacking kit in their boxes.
I'm stunned there are enough customers with good enough pitch control to make that a viable market
There's a nice site with a lot of the BLE API documented (including commands) at https://colmi.puxtril.com/
Alternatively, does anyone know if it's possible with the sensors just in this ring?
It's problematic for things like keyboards used for entering passwords - but if my next door neighbour wants to snoop on my living room thermometer or someone wants to snoop on my heart rate strap as I jog past their house? It doesn't seem to be much of a problem, in practice.
In the bad old days of bluetooth, loads of devices without screens would just hard code the pairing code to 000000 anyway. So it wasn't adding much security anyway. Unlike internet-connected devices, it's not exposed to a billion griefers from around the globe at any given moment.
The most similar device I've worked on is the various Oculus devices. Which will also accept bluetooth connections from absolutely everyone, but the first time you connect you store an encryption key that is used to secure all subsequent comms.
Oculus decides are pretty big, I assume they have buttons that allow you to recover from that. This ring doesn't.
Even most input-less smart devices have a way to do that though - like those ridiculous smartlight bulbs where you have to flick the light switch on and off in morse code to trigger the factory reset
Maybe they could have required you to hit the ring on a surface to initiate pairing mode. But as it stands the ring will pair with any device that asks for it.
I'm looking forward to someone making a custom firmware for these rings. There is some work in the linked ATC_RF03 project, but I'm not sure if anyone is still working on it
1. https://notes.tahnok.ca/blog/Smart+Ring+Reversing/2024-10-13... 2. https://gitee.com/BXMicro/SDK3
E.g there’s a definite motivation kick to drink less when I see what it does to my hrv and sleep trends for days afterwards, while I don’t particularly care about the numbers being all that accurate.
Edit: Oh and turning on afib history in your Apple Watch will make it record like 10x data points which also helps with that. Maybe
for what it's worth @tahnok I do this kind of (reverse) engineering of BLE for medical-grade devices for my day job, I'm keen to hack on this with y'all!
> JAVA RING: VERY RARE!
> More than 10 available – 1,230 sold
I get about four days of battery life with all of the sensors turned up to maximum frequency, which is every 5 minutes at least for the heart rate. Surprisingly good for such a small lightweight device. I imagine it could go a lot longer if you turned down the sensors to a lower frequency. I found a good rhythm is to charge it when I take showers, that seems to be a good balance and it never comes close to dying. My Apple Watch on the other hand regularly dies before I go to bed, and I can’t wear it for sleep tracking because it can’t last that long.
I will never understand people that pay a monthly subscription to access basic local sensor information like this. Yet I see people wearing subscription-based smart rings all the time. I don’t get it.
They come in different sizes and they don't necessarily correspond to standard USA ring sizes, so it takes some effort to measure and make sure you get the right one. But the effort is worth it to get a comfortable fit. And they are cheap enough that you can always buy multiple different sizes. I think I paid like $11 for mine on Taobao with free shipping (part of that may have been a discount since I was a new customer).
Try this:
Hyperventilate for a minute or two. Then, make a full exhale and hold it. You should be able to hold your breath for longer than you normally can and during this time you should see the value drop a bit. Be sure to inhale before you start getting dizzy or faint. (Note: do not do this under water)
Or while operating heavy machinery.
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/new-part-day-a-hackable-smar...
I just have a hard time justifying things like this when the apple watch + iphone work so well. But i'm sure at some point the apple experience will get worse and push people to other OS like windows is
* Different form factor
* Not tied to Apple Ecosystem.
* Price
* You can even use it independently (without phone).
If this is how you feel about technology why are you not on the verge instead of HACKER news?
1200$
I have an easier time justifying this
Still seems pretty clear as to why someone would find value in the ring. Another poster says he charges his ring while he showers. It's that quick. I'm not knocking smart-*, just reacting to the dismissive "why would anyone want this" attitude of GP.