Free USB Glucose meter with OLED display (Now with teardown!)

[Stonent]

EDIT: Pictures a page or so down, below is the original post I made.

It's a free Bayer USB Blood Glucose meter. It has an internal color LCD and some kind of rechargeable battery.
You fill out the form and they mail you a coupon and you take it to the store. I know someone who got one.
The hitch is, of course, the unit is free but the test strips are like $75 a box, of course if you were doing a teardown, you wouldn't need to buy any accessories.  They just went to Walmart with the coupon and didn't buy anything with it.

The box comes with a 5v 550ma wall charger, the meter, a box of 10 strips, a bag of lancets, a poking device and some calibration fluid.

Supposedly it stores data and you can upload it to your computer or a website to track. I'd be interested to see what's inside. The battery must be pretty good sized because the unit itself feels very heavy for the size.

https://www.bayercontour.com/Meter-and-Test-Strip-Savings/Save-on-Meters/Meter-Request?product=contournextusb&promospec=save



If you pick one up, please do a proper teardown on it or even better mail it to Dave to take apart.

[c4757p]

On one hand, I want to see what's inside one of those, it might be cool. On the other, it's probably something stupidly simple, and one of the more experienced forum members will come along and pop my bubble in 3... 2... 

[tom66]

I'd be interested to see the AFE and processing behind measuring blood glucose levels.
And are strips the next ink cartridge or does it really cost $75 to make a box of them?

[Stonent]

I'd be interested to see the AFE and processing behind measuring blood glucose levels.
And are strips the next ink cartridge or does it really cost $75 to make a box of them?

I did some research on it and it looks like it comes down to a chemical reaction with the sugar in your blood with a chemical on the strip that generates a small current which is measured by the meter.

But really if the process is the same for all testers, I don't see any reason why they couldn't make a universal strip (except they don't want to)

Like printer cartridges, some glucose meters can tell when strips are expired and reject them.

Once I was in the office of the CEO of a former employer (a multi billion dollar pharmaceutical company) working on a printing issue and it came down to one of the cartridges being dried up in his printer.  So I ran downstairs to the store room and grabbed another one. Once I installed it said the ink was expired. He thought it was about as idiotic as I did. Since we had bought those cartridges in bulk ahead of time we pretty much were going to have to junk them.

I told him I'd just have to bring him a new printer rather than have him wait for a new cartridge to come in.

[sleemanj]

As a type 1 diabetic, I can tell you that yes it's a reaction on the strip which produces a small voltage.  If you take a strip, apply the requisite drop of blood, and stick your multimeter across the terminals you can see the voltage change.

I shouldn't expect there is much interesting in there, a (I suppose highly specified) op-amp, an MCU with a high resolution ADC and a display, probably about all you need.  The technology is probably more in the strip.

It used to be the case that boxes of strips came with special coding strips, active devices of some sort, plug them into the same strip port on the meter and it would calibrate the meter to that particular batch of strips, displaying a batch code so you can verify.  Not the case any more, I guess strip manufacturing has become good enough that they can reliably just have a single batch code (that, or they decided they don't care about the margin of error).

[free_electron]

We have an application where we use an stm8 cpu driving a static lcd display powered from a simgle cr2025 cell. There is only the cpu , the display , an rc oscillator the battry and one pushbutton. And a little slieblock where you stick the strip in. The whole thing is designed to run for 5 years off the cr2025 cell assuming 5 tests a day. The cpu is in low power mode. The pushbutton yanks an interrupt pin that wakes the cpu , does its thing ,shows a reading and then shuts off after 30 seconds.

In other words: there's nothing in those things. One pharmaceutical company actually uses our reference design and mass produces these things. They can't be opened , are sealed waterproof and when the battery is empty you throw it away.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Could be interesting to investigate hacking to re-purpose...

[SeanB]

I did pull one apart as it was cheaper to buy a new unit than the test strips, so bought the no code ones that absolutely do not care about the strip other than having each strip having a on strip trimmed resistor to calibrate the meter.  Internally a single chip micro, a few AD analogue switches and a few low voltage AD opamps are it, along with a few resistors, capacitors and diodes and the custom LCD driven from the micro. Also had a rechargeable lithium cell as back up for when you are changing the main battery, needed as it stored the last 100 readings with time stamps and calaculated a few averages from it. Even had a full IRDA port on it to communicate using a (proprietary and of course expensive) USB dongle and ( even more expensive) Windows based software. Never got that, just bought the new one with cheap strips, which are around $10 for 50 in a desiccant lined plastic bottle.

[amyk]

Agreed, a little gadget with an MCU, LCD, USB and few buttons could be repurposed for a variety of uses... and am I the only one who thinks an electronic device telling you to "apply blood" is just a little creepy?

After seeing what the test strips look like, I now realise I have a bunch of them that someone left on a table in the mall. No blood on them, so at the time I thought they were RFID tags or some sort of other microelectronics. They're made of a few laminated layers.

Once I was in the office of the CEO of a former employer (a multi billion dollar pharmaceutical company) working on a printing issue and it came down to one of the cartridges being dried up in his printer.  So I ran downstairs to the store room and grabbed another one. Once I installed it said the ink was expired. He thought it was about as idiotic as I did. Since we had bought those cartridges in bulk ahead of time we pretty much were going to have to junk them.

This is when you fire up the EEPROM programmer and rewrite the dates on them.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Agreed, a little gadget with an MCU, LCD, USB and few buttons could be repurposed for a variety of uses... and am I the only one who thinks an electronic device telling you to "apply blood" is just a little creepy?

After seeing what the test strips look like, I now realise I have a bunch of them that someone left on a table in the mall. No blood on them, so at the time I thought they were RFID tags or some sort of other microelectronics. They're made of a few laminated layers.

Once I was in the office of the CEO of a former employer (a multi billion dollar pharmaceutical company) working on a printing issue and it came down to one of the cartridges being dried up in his printer.  So I ran downstairs to the store room and grabbed another one. Once I installed it said the ink was expired. He thought it was about as idiotic as I did. Since we had bought those cartridges in bulk ahead of time we pretty much were going to have to junk them.

This is when you fire up the EEPROM programmer and rewrite the dates on them.

..or maybe just set the date back on the PC?

[free_electron]

. and am I the only one who thinks an electronic device telling you to "apply blood"is just a little creepy?

All good electronics is designed using a lot of blood sweat and tears.. Oh wait... That's the design, not the usage ... Never mind ...

[dexters_lab]

I bought a blood glucose meter a few years ago as the testers are only £20 or so, the process is pretty simple, i wouldnt expect much inside, it will be highly integrated.

[tinhead]

not sure if the current hw revision is exact the same (from what i can see PCB seems to be bit different routed, but that's all)
as the first hw revision, but in case yes here my findings (from March 2010)

OLED seems to be 160x60pix, controller IC SSD1353

Attached a well the org firmware (in case someone wish to play with it), Bayer forgot to protect the STM32.

I have still few of them, but never got time to play deeper :\

[tinhead]

and here the newer revision (from mid 2012). These pictures are made by someone else, so no better quality available.

[Stonent]

Could be interesting to investigate hacking to re-purpose...

That was more my line of thinking. Maybe a small LiPo battery inside and maybe hack the screen.

They have them in the UK but there's only 50 free each month.

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/promotions/contour-next-usb-giveaway.html

[Stonent]

Regarding the variations, there was a previous revision with out the "next" in it that I heard during a review on youtube. They were saying this one added some kind of website tie-in where you could upload your data. Though I would think that they could have done all that in software on the PC.

[Stonent]

Could be interesting to investigate hacking to re-purpose...

So basically a STM32F103 dev board with 3 buttons and an OLED display and surely an ADC to read the strips.

Could this be the next trend in cheap chinese DSOs? They go from MP3 players to glucose meters? 72Mhz ARM cortex M3 chip could probably handle some low end reading.

I found they had another meter that had a USB cable with an FTDI chip and a 3.5mm headphone plug. Made me wonder if they developed that one on a Picaxe? 

[Stonent]

Ok I had to know what was inside, so I got one.
This one is a bit different and was a bit disappointed it wasn't the ST Micro ARM chip.

There's a QFP on the back marked:

TOSHIBA
T5DB0
1248 HUL
167288
JAPAN

On the other side there's a Micron chip labeled:

2VD12
NW322

And on the edge says QQVNB (Edit, found it: http://www.micron.com/parts/nand-flash/serial-nand/mt29f1g01aaaddh4-it )
1Gb Serial NAND Flash

The other chip I can't tell a vendor, appears to be a BGA labeled
F3796 017
1244PM404
MALAYSIA

There's a small 5 pin chip right about 1/2 way between them, it appears to be labeled "PHP" or "PNP" I can't tell

And there's a small cluster of parts below the button marked "Down"
Two of them are 8 pin chips that even I can't read with my 20/10 vision, so I'll have to hunt down a magnifying glass later.

The battery pack looks identical to the pictures posted earlier so I didn't bother with it.

The LCD has a chip on the flex cable. I'd say around 16 or 15 mm long and 2 mm wide.
The end of the flex cable is a little wider than the chip and looks like it could go into a LIF ribbon connector but they've stuck another adapter on top of it to squeeze it down to about 6 or 7 mm wide and appears to have 24 pins.

Anyone have some data on the Toshiba chip or the one without the vendor name? I'm not having much luck.

[amyk]

No idea about the BGA but 1244 is very likely the datecode (week 44 2012), same with 1248 on the Toshiba one.

Given that the previous version used an ARM-based MCU and Toshiba has some, maybe it's a TMPM373FWDUG?

Or it could be a custom mask-ROM one, downsized to an 8 or 16-bit non-ARM core.

[tinhead]

ahh that'S evry unfortunate, but good to know that the "Contour Next USB" is not anymore STM32 based as "Contour USB" was.

[Stonent]

OK someone cracked the code to the service menu 3422

[Stonent]

ahh that'S evry unfortunate, but good to know that the "Contour Next USB" is not anymore STM32 based as "Contour USB" was.

It appears you can get the original with the STM32 chip for less than $10 USD

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=contour+usb&_sop=15&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0&_nkw=bayer+contour+usb&_sacat=0

[tinhead]

OK someone cracked the code to the service menu 3422

yeah, thats was me, i found it as plain text in the firmware dump i made.

It appears you can get the original with the STM32 chip for less than $10 USD

i bough in 2011 4pcs from a shop in US and paid 12USD total, so it was dirt cheap at that time.
But still, 10USD for an "STM32 dev USB stick with 1G memory and OLED" is cheap as well.

[Stonent]

So how did you end up dumping the firmware? Just using the test points on the back? Or via the USB port?

[johnmx]

It appears you can get the original with the STM32 chip for less than $10 USD
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=contour+usb&_sop=15&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0&_nkw=bayer+contour+usb&_sacat=0

Unfortunately the shipping costs are too high.