Jan 2, 2015 | By Simon
Inspired by recent crowdfunded attempts to bring a smart ring to market, arduino enthusiast Kevin Bates of Arduboy set out to create his own smart ring design and unlike previous attempts, actually works!
The Ö Bluetooth Ring, which Bates used a 3D printer to fabricate, is a Bluetooth-enabled finger wearable powered by an ARM-M0 embedded microprocessor running at 16mhz. Featuring a 64x32 monochrome OLED display and a touch button, the chip includes an inbuilt 256KB of flash storage coupled with 16KB of RAM. The ring also makes use of a 40mAH battery that keeps it powered for up to four hours with the display on, or twenty-four hours in standby mode. Additionally, the device was programmed using the cloud-based mbed developer platform, which is able to be easily modified using the platform's drag and drop programming via a USB connection.
Similar to smart watches and other wearables that we've seen that communicate directly to a smart phone, the ring notifies its user to incoming calls or messages while also allowing the user to interact with the notifications directly from the ring. In essence, a user would have no direct need to take their smart phone out unless they needed to reply or create a new message.
According to his blog post on Arduboy, Bates confirmed that he has reached out to manufacturers and has already seen some production price quotes worth following-up on. His plan in 2015 is to work full time on managing the production of the first batch.
"This has been a long process but much has happened behind the scenes that I just am not allowed to share yet!" Bates said.
"It's thanks to all my fans that this is possible, because of all of your youtube views, comments, blog posts and facebook likes we can make Arduboy an amazing company to make lots more cool stuff!"
If you want to create your own Ö Bluetooth Ring for the time being, Bates has supplied a tutorial for creating your own on the Arduboy website. Included are the files for 3D printing the ring as well as the assembly instructions and resources for programming.
Although the finished ring is most likely not going to be 3D printed (injection molded?), it's inspiring to see projects such as Bates' start from a 3D printer and some simple programming.
While there's no word yet on when a final product might be available, you can stay updated over at Arduboy or follow Bates on Twitter.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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