Hi! I'm Jeff at iFixit, and today we're tearing down the smallest device
we've ever had on the channel. How small is that? Well, you're already looking at it...
It's right here. This is the Oura Ring 2. Now, this little device is interesting
for a whole bunch of reasons. If you're a sports fan, you've probably heard that
the NBA is distributing these to players in hopes of catching early signs of COVID-19.
If you're a fan of biohacking, you may have heard that this little guy
can monitor a lot of your vital signs as well as your sleep patterns.
I'm here mainly as a fan of technology. We've seen a lot of silly, gimmicky devices
come across our teardown table over the years, but I actually think this one's kind of cool!
And I want to see how it works. So, we're gonna take it apart.
Now, I've never seen a "wellness ring" before today, let alone taken one apart.
So, I'm not expecting this to be easy. This ring is totally waterproof
and evidently it's built to take quite a beating.
So they've probably done just about everything possible to make it impossible to do what we're gonna try to do.
I would love to have a working Oura Ring at the end of this video...
but I wouldn't put money on that happening.
Presumably, somewhere inside here is a battery, an inductive charge coil, a processor, storage,
three different kinds of sensors, and Bluetooth communication hardware.
This X-ray is a teaser from our friends at Creative Electron, and I see this being really helpful later.
So, I brought this vise in order to keep a good hold on this thing
while we try to pry it apart—but it occurs to me now that we're here that
maybe we can just deform it enough to pop that inner ring out? Maybe? We'll see.
I'm a little worried that if I just go prying at it
I'm gonna do more damage than anything else.
Well, that is deforming the ring... but...
[stressed popping sounds from ring]
Wellll, the pressure from the vise isn't going to be enough
but maybe adding a little heat will loosen things up.
[sound of heat gun powering up]
My thought here is that different materials expand at different rates.
There's an outer, metal cover to this ring obviously, and then there's the circuit board
plus a sort of polymer coating on the inside. And my hope is that deforming it
and heat cycling it a few times will get those two different materials expanding
at different rates, and pop loose. But, there's no guarantee that's gonna work.
So if this doesn't bear fruit here in the next few minutes
we may have to try something more aggressive... Maybe some cutting tools. I don't know. We'll see!
No progress yet... I was hoping those layers might start to pop apart
but no such luck. This might be the wrong way to do this.
Ooookay, I think it's time to get destructive. I'm gonna grab an X-Acto knife
and aim for a little gap in the circuit board that I think I can sort of see through the resin.
I could just be cutting the circuit board in half though. We'll find out.
The razor is pretty much my least favorite tool here; it's a last resort. But, we seem to be making progress...
It IS cutting through this resin. As you can see, there's transparent flecks of
resin dust going everywhere.
Okay, so let's take it back out...
We've cut a little bit of a groove there in the ring
You can see that. Maybe I can finish it off with a dental pick...
So, the combination of cutting through that outer layer of... epoxy? ...and deforming it with heat and pressure
seems to have popped up just a little bit of the circuit board.
Just a bit! I don't know if you can see that, but it's coming loose.
It's definitely coming loose! So I think maybe the next step is an alcohol bath.
Let's see how that works.
[plop]
Well, it's the wrong kind of alcohol for this glass, but we're improvising.
I'm approaching this with my electronics repair skillset, but
if there are any jewelers in the audience who would do this differently, give us a shout in the comments.
I'd be curious to hear what you would do.
I'm using the blade of a Halberd spudger here—that's a glass-filled nylon tool.
So it's relatively soft, and not as destructive as, say, just carving it out with an X-Acto knife.
Alright, cool! Well, that wasn't quite as bad as I feared.
You can see the ring is a little worse for wear... the outside is pretty deformed.
But it came out relatively intact! I don't think I've ripped any ribbon cables or anything yet.
This looks like a little piece of insulation here that I cut through
when we did the initial cut with the X-Acto knife.
But I THINK everything else is intact.
Oh! There's a tag of some kind. Is that a Bluetooth antenna or ...?
Let's see if we can get it out intact. It's very delicate, whatever it is.
That, my friends, is the battery label! Look at that.
So, 3.7 volts, 21 milliamp hours, 0.0777 watt hours.
That's a pretty tiny battery! Grepow, that's a Chinese manufacturer in Shenzhen, I think.
Usually we'd see their batteries in a drone or maybe an RC car, so... that's interesting.
This battery, small as it is, is still a bit thicker than the rest of the circuit board
So the battery sits directly underneath that slightly squared-off hump at the top of the ring
where there's a little more volume.
To get a better look at the board, I want to flatten it out, BUT
this entire thing seems to be encased in this resin or epoxy... stuff.
This stuff is hypoallergenic and waterproof, so you can wear it ALL the time
but it definitely makes my job harder.
[sound of heat gun powering up]
Getting it good and hot seems to make it a bit more flexible... and yeah, it's flattening out.
That might be as far as our disassembly goes
but thankfully the resin is transparent, so we can see right through it
and make some observations about how this thing is put together.
I'm gonna take some guesses about what we're looking at here.
None of it is labeled, so if I guess wrong, be sure to point and laugh in the comments
but then remember to give us the right answer before you go.
On the finger-facing side, we've got three types of sensors:
one pair of infrared LEDs with an IR receiver (that's all part of the pulse oximeter)
one accelerometer and gyroscope, and there's a temperature sensor here as well
although it's a tiny negative thermal coefficient thermistor
and my eyesight's not good enough to tell you which one of these little surface mount components it might be.
On the hidden backside, we've got one Cypress PSoC 6 ultra low power
dual-core microcontroller with built-in Bluetooth low-energy connectivity
one Texas Instruments low current battery management chip
and several extra tiny, unmarked chips—give us a shout if you've got any intel on those.
Now all that aside, you might still be wondering, how do you charge the battery in this thing?
Well, we can't see it in our teardown, but that's where those X-rays from Creative Electron
come in really handy. Because sitting just underneath the battery
is a paper-thin inductive charging coil. It charges wirelessly
so you just have to get it close to the matching charge coil on the charging dock
which you can see in another X-ray right here.
What can we say about repairability? Well, this definitely doesn't seem designed to be serviced.
If we were to assign it a repairability score, it would be... low.
But, this is the first smart ring teardown we've ever done
and we haven't even developed a rubric for smart rings yet. So, maybe I'll punt on the score, for now.
I will just say, there's not a lot to go wrong here. There's no moving parts
and it's totally protected by this titanium shell.
So just about the only thing that's ever likely to need service is the battery.
BUT.
When the battery starts to fail, yeah. I think you're out of luck.
As far as I can tell, this is a disposable product.
Okay, that's gonna do it. That's about as far as I know how to go. The next step would probably be
a sulfuric acid bath, and I checked the pantry... I'm fresh out. So we'll call it there!
If you know something we don't, or if you saw something that we missed
sound off in the comments! Otherwise, we'll see you next time.
Thanks for watching :)