Ring-O

Let gestures speak for you with this bluetooth enabled gesture ring 💍

Akshay Baweja
3 min readDec 19, 2018
Demo Video for Ring-O

Introduction

Ring-O is a hardware device that resembles an ordinary ring, that houses sensors and electronics inside a custom designed 3D printed ring to give it the ability to control devices and render input. It can enable gesture controls, for instance, as well as text input by drawing letters in the air, gesture-based authorization for payments, IoT enabled home device control, Music Player controls and much more.

Ring-O’s sensors can detect even the smallest movements of your finger. It has some of basic in-built gestures but users can program their own gestures using the Software Development Kit designed for Ring-O. It also has a built-in keyboard character set that allows you to type in the air.

Ring-O inside 3D printed case along with battery

Ring-O is based on Bluetooth 4.0 hence it allows you to pair with all newer devices those are Bluetooth 4.0 enabled.

What’s Inside Ring-O? 🧐

Ring-O houses an accelerometer and gyroscope combo along with a BLE 4.0 to transmit data to device it is connected to. At heart it uses machine learning to process the gestures made in air and acts accordingly.

Ring-O Main Board that houses Microcontroller, Accelerometer and Gyroscope Combo along with BLE 4.0

A micro-controller inside the ring interfaces the accelerometer and gyroscope data with the Ring-O Application via BLE 4.0. The whole system is powered by a 180 mAh Lithium Polymer battery.

The ring could be charged by a micro usb mobile charger. For now, the ring has a 2 pin connector mounted onto it but in future, I intend to introduce wireless charging as the charging option. So, all you need to do is just place the ring on charging pad and it starts charging.

Ring-O Charger

Ring-O is 3D designed and printed using PLA material since it is biodegradable as well.

3D Printed Case to house Ring-O PCBs

Is it easy to use? 🤔

Ring-O is very intuitive and easy to use. One will be used to it in no time. Just perform gestures as a daily routine and see magic.

  1. Wear ring on your index finger with button facing towards your thumb.
  2. Start making gestures by pressing and holding down the button.
  3. Once you’re done drawing the gesture, release the button.

And it’s done, your drawn gesture will be processed within milliseconds, and the required action corresponding to that gesture will be performed.

See it yourself 👇

This was one of my dream projects and took around two months to finish from scratch to one you just saw. I plan to build this further and open source it. This project still remains closest to my heart ❤️.

Thanks for reading.

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Akshay Baweja
Akshay Baweja

Written by Akshay Baweja

A creative technologist interested in exploring non-screen based human computer interactions