If someone were able to find a reliable source for the same band this work could turn into the nucleus of many wearable projects. It's hard for beginners to build electronics that are 1. small 2. comfortable 3. power efficient. These bands already take care of all of that.<p>There are many applications for this sort of platform. One could easily build a discreet pen testing tool which records information it sees about Bluetooth devices nearby. Or create an embedded engineering Swiss Army knife which exposes IO on your wrist to an app on your phone so you can jack into gadgets you find and poke around on the spot. Fun social applications to try too, like buying one of these for every attendee at your conference and building peer-to-peer applications on top.<p>Mapping out the programming interface is essential to enabling all that fun, but so is finding a reliable source for these devices.
If anyone is looking for a business idea, if you could hack these things to be a remote control so that dance teachers can use it to pause/play and skip-to-next on the cheap and without having to run to their phone, that would sell like hotcakes. Typical scenario now is: teacher plugs phone into amp, then needs to run up and down to phone every 5 minutes. Having a bluetooth connection so that the bracelet can work as a play/skip remote for the phone would be enough. Range might be an issue, needs to be 30 meters (reliably) or so.
I'm curious about the level of expertise you need in order to do this. I also have a cheap bracelet and I wanted to do the same thing, but reading this article seems like you need to be an expert in electronics/lowlevelprogramming.
Awesome work and inspiring write up. I’ve started doing similar things lately and I can imagine exactly how much grinding was involved to get the end result. You must have felt great when the display finally showed the image :)
> I look very much forward to rellocate it all the way to the back of my drawer and leave it there for some time.<p>This is funny - I feel the same way about a lot of side projects I undertake. Great writeup btw. I feel like this type of stuff gets harder and harder as ICs fit into tighter packages. Glad someone is taking the time to explore.
As far as I can see it doesn't do the heart rate monitoring - the only thing on the features list a smartphone can't do. What I really want (writing it here just in hope somebody might know a suitable model) of a hackable fitness device is to supply reasonably precise real-time heart rate data letting my DIY Android app react on its change.