For two years, the ring whispered to me.
Not literally. But every few weeks, an email would arrive. A Kickstarter update. A shipping delay. A manufacturing setback. A promise that it was almost ready. Each one a small reminder that somewhere in South Korea, a team was trying to fit a microphone, a Bluetooth radio, and an IMA ADPCM audio codec into a titanium band that fits on your finger.
This is the story of the WIZPR Ring: how I found it, how I waited for it, and how I reverse-engineered its entire undocumented BLE protocol the night it arrived.
The Whisper
In February 2024, I put down a $5 deposit on a pre-launch page for something called the WHSP Ring. A voice-interaction wearable. Press a button on your finger, whisper a command, and an AI assistant on your phone processes it. The form factor was the thing that caught me. Not another watch, not another earbud. A ring.
A month later, they renamed it. "WHSP RING is becoming WIZPR RING," the email said. The Kickstarter launched March 20th. I backed it March 21st.
The campaign funded successfully. 1,084 backers, $163K raised. Surveys went out. I picked my size, my color, my shipping address.
And then the waiting began.
43 Updates
If you've ever backed hardware on Kickstarter, you know the arc. The early updates are optimistic. Tooling has begun. CNC machining looks great. The app is coming along.
Then reality sets in.
Update #10 (August 2024): "We regret to inform you that the promised delivery date has arrived, but we have not yet shipped your orders."
Update #12 (September 2024): Antenna redesign required. Hardware changes.
Update #15 (November 2024): "Important Update on Shipping Delays and Our Sincere Apology."
Update #24 (August 2025): "Shipping was promised for Q3 2024, yet we are now almost a full year late."
Update #36 (December 2025): "It breaks our hearts and fills us with a deep sense of regret to think that many of you supported our project with the hope of receiving the Wizpr Ring as a gift."
Forty-three updates over twenty-five months. Antenna issues, titanium PVD coating problems, a charging pin redesign, a full manufacturing partner switch. Each email another whisper. Still here. Still coming. Not yet.
I never asked for a refund. The ring had its hooks in me.
Saturday, 3:53 PM
On May 2nd, 2026, my building's package notification system sent me an email: "A package for Nicholas has arrived to the package room."
The carrier was YunTrack, with a last-mile handoff to GOFO. Twenty-five months and eleven days after I backed it on Kickstarter, the ring was in my hands.
I charged the case. I paired it to my phone. I opened the official WIZPR app, pressed the button, spoke a command, and watched it work.
And then I did what any reasonable person would do.
I opened my laptop and started taking the ring apart, digitally.
What Was Known
The first thing I did was search. Someone, somewhere, had to have looked at this thing over BLE already.
I found R-D-BioTech-Alaska/Wizpr-Suite on GitHub. A small project that had done the genuinely hard first step: figuring out how to connect to the ring over BLE at all, building a GATT inspector, wiring up the bleak Python library on macOS, and recognizing that the ring's protocol was completely undocumented. Their framing was clear: the path forward is user-controlled reverse engineering.
I forked it, cloned it, and started reading.
The ring uses a single BLE service with seven characteristics. Some notify. Some accept writes. None of them are documented by the manufacturer. The official iOS app connects, does its thing, and doesn't explain how. The repo had the scaffolding to connect and listen. What it didn't have was a map of what the ring was actually saying.
That became the project.
The Overnight
By 3:34 PM, I had my first commit: fixing dataclass decorators in the forked code so it would actually run. By 3:56 PM, the BLE scanner was filtering for WIZPR RING devices, connecting, and dumping GATT characteristics to the console.
What I found was surprisingly clean. The ring speaks plain ASCII text on characteristic 00000007. Press the button, and it sends CLICK. Raise your hand to your mouth, and it sends MIC_PRE_ON, then MIC_ON. Lower your hand, MIC_OFF. Send it BATTERY and it replies with the voltage. Send GET_VERSION and it tells you its firmware. Four commands in, four commands out. No binary protocol, no handshake, no session negotiation. Connect, subscribe, listen.
The audio was the interesting part. While the mic is on, characteristic 00000001 streams a steady 35.4 packets per second, each one 224 bytes. The question was: what codec?
I wrote a hypothesis tester. Captured a session of myself speaking, saved every packet timestamped in a JSON file, then ran the same data through every plausible decoder: Opus, mu-law, A-law, raw PCM at various rates, and IMA ADPCM at 8 kHz and 16 kHz. Most produced noise. One produced my voice.
IMA ADPCM, 16 kHz, mono, continuous state across packets. 224 bytes per packet gives you 448 samples at 4-bit depth, which is exactly 28 milliseconds of audio per BLE notification. The key detail that cost me an hour: the decoder state has to carry across packets. Reset it per-notification and you get static. Keep it running and you get clean speech.
By 10:30 PM, the audio codec was identified and documented. By midnight, I'd built a guided capture tool with a PySide6 UI, a standalone probing script for interactive characteristic exploration, and a ring daemon that holds a persistent BLE connection and accepts commands over a named pipe.
Between midnight and 4 AM, I ran a systematic probe campaign on the unmapped write-only characteristics. Four of them silently accept arbitrary data with no observable effect. One controls the ring's purple LED, but only indirectly: the LED fires on BLE connection and can't be triggered independently. The ring has no vibration motor. No haptic feedback channel. No way to signal the wearer from software.
At 4:05 AM, I closed the probe campaign and wrote the documentation. The protocol was fully mapped.
At 5:09 AM, I started a new repo. A native macOS menubar app in Swift, consuming the protocol I'd just reverse-engineered. Hand-rolled IMA ADPCM decoder (Apple's built-in AudioToolbox does ADPCM, but it expects Apple's variant with 34-byte frames, not the ring's 224-byte continuous stream). By mid-morning, the Mac app had a working BLE client with auto-reconnect, tested ADPCM decoder, and an audio pipeline design spec.
I went to a two-year-old's Cars-themed birthday party that afternoon. There were checkered flags and Lightning McQueen balloons. I sang happy birthday. I had not slept.
What the Ring Actually Is
Here's the complete protocol, because someone searching for this in eighteen months deserves to find it:
Ring → Phone (notifications on char 00000007)
CLICK button pressed
MIC_PRE_ON raise-to-speak gesture detected
MIC_ON mic active, audio streaming on char 00000001
MIC_OFF mic deactivated
BATTERY N(V) battery voltage response
VER XXXX firmware version response
Phone → Ring (writes to char 00000007)
LOCK disable ring input (hard mute)
BATTERY query battery level
GET_VERSION query firmware version
RESET reboot ring (kills BLE connection)
Audio (char 00000001, while MIC_ON)
Codec: IMA ADPCM, 4-bit, 16 kHz mono
Frame: 224 bytes = 448 samples = 28 ms
Rate: ~35.4 packets/second
State: continuous across packets (do NOT reset per notification)
No pairing required. No authentication. No session handshake. If you can see it, you can talk to it.
The ring accepts exactly one BLE connection at a time. If your iPhone has the WIZPR app running, the ring is connected to it and won't advertise. Disconnect the phone first.
Why This Matters
The WIZPR Ring ships with an app that routes your voice through their cloud for processing. That's fine. It works. But the ring itself is just a microphone and a button on your finger with a BLE radio. There's no reason the audio has to go through their servers.
With the protocol mapped, the ring becomes a general-purpose voice input device. A tactile, always-on-your-hand trigger for anything that can listen to a BLE characteristic and decode ADPCM audio. For me, that means feeding it into my own local AI stack. For someone else, it might mean accessibility tooling, or voice-triggered home automation, or a wearable dictation device that never touches the cloud.
The official app is one client. Now anyone can write another.
The Repo
Everything is at niclydon/wizpr-tools. The protocol reference, the audio codec documentation, the capture tool, the probing scripts, and a 50-line quickstart that connects to the ring and records a WAV file.
It wouldn't exist without the upstream work from R-D-BioTech-Alaska/Wizpr-Suite. They did the hard part. I mapped what they found.
The ring is on my desk right now, sitting on its charging cradle, its purple LED dark. It's not connected to anything. But I know it's listening for a connection, cycling through its advertisement packets every few seconds, waiting for someone to subscribe.
It waited twenty-five months to reach me. I couldn't put it down.
Top comments (0)