Induction powered LED lit engagement ring

As a person who made his own titanium wedding ring, I have to laugh a bit. It appears this ring is chamfered on only one side. That makes it a bit of a chinese finger trap, easy to put on, uncomfortable to remove. A good metaphor.

Don't tell my wife, but cutting a round chamfer on the back side of a ring is really hard. I built a custom chock and ground a tool to do just that.

Assuming the diamonds are all recessed, cutting a backside chamfer shouldn't be impossible. Just chock, indicate, and re-chock, repeat, until you get it aligned.

This is a brilliant piece of art.

The only thing I would add is that titanium is a PITA, but while I have no experience, apparently most of the problems go away when you have coolant. I have seen production cutting tools at GE Aircraft and they rough cut like it is butter.

There's more "hacking" that went into this ring than most of the usual HN front page articles.

This is truly an impressive bit of work, and I hope the author and his beloved share a happy and healthy life together for the rest of their days.

"Well, she insists that I change the design on this ring to make it more permanent and forgo a professionally made ring."

You have a keeper here. I made a (low-tech) engagement ring for my late wife, years ago. She would never have dreamed of replacing it.

This is really awesome. Funny enough there was a post and on going discussion on HN recently regarding the social pressure on women to have a traditional diamond ring. I refrained from commenting, very unlike me, but I wanted to make the point at the time that if a women presented her friends with a small brown stone, but the back story was how her partner mined the diamond and shaped it himself, no store bought diamond or social norms could compare.

Haha I used to work with Ben (the OP) a few years ago and saw this on his FB over the weekend. He is an awesome and hilarious guy on top of being an amazing hacker (especially in hardware). It was a pleasure working with him for the few months before he left the company.

This is lovely!

It's really interesting to see all the metal work stuff that went into making this ring.

I love seeing the failures of mounting the stones. Seeing a product from start to finish is good, but seeing the problems encountered during the process is a better opportunity for me to learn.

A gentle note of warning: if you ever have a problem with your finger please take off your titanium ring before your finger starts to swell. It's tricky for clinicians to cut off titanium rings. Gold and silver are much softer and much easier to cut off.

Excellent job, it reminds me a lot of the effort and creativity involved with the Gir Proposal Robot[1].

Kudos to the OP for taking the time, and effort, to create something unique while learning a lot in the process. You've set the bar higher for creative proposals =)

Regarding stone-setting, a quick thought on that -- since you have to mount material (and fill) on the inside of the ring, could you not have made the holes larger on the inside than the outside, and fixed their positions from the filler?

Awesome ring! At some point someone will make flex circuits for this type of application. And it certainly puts the old one-button rings from Dallas Semiconductor to shame :-)

If I ever saw a work of love, this is it.

So the problem of attaching the stones was never really solved? that section seemed to be leading up to a moment of genius and a thrilling conclusion, but it looked like it was just epoxy in the end.

This title is really difficult to parse as it is:

  "Induction powered LED lit engagement ring"

mostly because it should be:

  "Induction-powered, LED-lit engagement ring"

The ring I bought for my wife has a highly fluorescent solitary diamond. If you can find enough of these to fit your final version, and if you can find LEDs of a sufficient wavelength to trigger fluorescence, the result might be quite nice.

This is insane and very impressive, but I have to ask -- how does he have access to all these tools, and all this expertise? Is this a product of his job as an engineer? These seem like a lot of very expensive and large metalworking tools and some seriously in-depth domain knowledge. Really impressive either way.

Fantastic project! My wife and I spent the day making rings for each other here:

http://www.weddingringworkshop.co.uk/cms.php?pageid=2

which is highly recommended, but sadly we didn't have the option to add an inductively powered LED lighting element to them :-)

This is one of the most heartwarming things I've read on HN, thank you for posting details of how you did it!

I really enjoy reading hardware write ups, because it's such a completely different set of skills and seems fascinating. Plus look at how awesome the finished product is, it's a clever combination of components and I'm not surprised his fiance said to just make it more polished.

I still love my husband's grandmother's ring...but damn, this is cool.

"the stone would fracture along pre-existing crack lines."

"The failure mechanism is that it CRUSHES the stone to dust"

Presumably these weren't diamonds then...? Those would be expensive mistakes.

As neither a mechanic nor a photographer, thank you for the clear explanation. I learned a lot and was, at the same time, smiling... was your (now) fiance berating you during the development process for spending all of your time in the workshop/start up office or did she know what she is getting in to. Let's be honest, with your skill level on fabrication combined with curiosity I don't suppose this is the last project...

Meanwhile a (long and rambling) question. With some friends we bought a friend a quality lathe for their birthday. I was involved in sneaking it in to their basement, and holy * was that thing heavy! During the write up you make use of various tools - some seem appear to be professional level, base mounted etc, then at the end you mention the dremel... right place/right time... does it do the job you expect of it?

As an Englishman that moved to the US, 15 years later I am still trying to decipher infomercials, advertisements, brand names & US/Europe preconceptions, all comment welcome!

Now, this is the sort of stuff I expect to find on Hacker News. Awesome work.

Since electronics are getting smaller, perhaps we are going to see more "useful" rings. RFID rings for identification, anyone?

Awesome idea! I was thinking of doing something similar using an energy scavenging IC with the coil and only pulsing the LED for brief flashes when enough charge is stored.

but does it bind all the other rings of power?

Next step: the OAuth Ring ;)

Now build a USB-powered mousepad to make her ring glow all day at work!

This is awesome. I'm not sure my non-geek wife would like it, but I would have.

Many people wear their rings in the shower, or even just washing their hands. I wonder how it stands up to water damage.

Impressive--but likely uncomfortable to wear because of the thickness and square edges. Perhaps a comfort fit finish on the interior, with rounded corners, and a third less thick.

Next project, the ring of power with glowing inscription?-)

>There was a small hitch...i[t']s a really tight fit for her

Definitely the Homer Simpson D'oh moment. Could you have shaved the inside to make the adjustments?

What an awesome idea! You should have patented it!

Figure 37 at the bottom reminds me of Iron Man :)

Ridiculously cool. Thanks for posting this!

Good luck at airport security checks :)

Cool piece of work! How about making the ring glow in a particular color when the guy is in proximity? Imagine how awesome it'd be for the girl to get up and say "well, my boyfriend is here..."

And on another note I figured that this is exactly how machines creep into our lives - emotional pitch. Live example!