I love this video! The implant looks amazing. I’ll probably get mine in that spot. I’m still worried the implant may be too visible on the back of my hand.
What color did you say you got? Looks pink
I like the placement a lot - while it would be nice to be able to scan from either side, it’s not at all difficult to flip your arm and get a read. Plus, reading from a vertically mounted scanner is even easier than getting a read from L0.
Mine is purple. The video blows out the colour a little, so it looks a lot lighter of a colour than it actually is. I would say it doesn’t look purple in person. Maybe there’s a tinge more darkness than a straight red LED would be under the skin, but if no one told me it was purple, I would just assume it was red under there.
1 Like
So it’s unable to scan through your wrist? I’m surprised by that tbh. Either way still looks like a good placement for it!
The closest I’ve gotten to a scan from below my wrist is getting all of the LEDs to light up (and that was by shoving my wrist on top of the scanner pretty much as hard as I could). I do have some chonky wrists though, so mileage might vary depending on that aspect of your body.
My doNExT doesn’t read through my wrist with an ACR122U. It does however with a DL533-XL long-range reader without any problem whatsoever. Also, it lights up from a good 3" away.
1 Like
Update: I’m going on day 4 of my ntag not reading. For some reason, starting this past Saturday, my ACR122U doesn’t register the flexNExT being scanned (found this out when Rohos wouldn’t log me into my computer). This had happened once before (when the scanner wouldn’t pick it up), but it started reading within a couple hours. This time around, it seems much more bitchy. I’m hoping that this is related to the fact that I’ve been moving furniture across town and around my house for the past few days, but truthfully, it is a bit disconcerting.
Just wanted to share for anyone else following along with flexNExT installs
Edit to the update:
Forgot to mention that the LEDs are working intermittently as well. There’s one in particular that’s pretty much always working fine, but there’s one that hardly works at all, and the other is pretty finicky and will only light up when I place the reader in a particular position (whereas before the LEDs were all pretty responsive to the reader). Also, for what it’s worth, my phone can’t pick up the NTAG either (the NDEF holds a VCard), so I can say pretty definitively that it’s not the reader that’s the problem.
Next paycheck I’m planning on picking up one of the DT Proxmarks, so hopefully that will shed a little more light on that.
That is why I am exceedingly careful with mine.
Amal has shown that the flexNExT can withstand extreme abuse once, but it’s people like us who will find out if it is prone to fatigue failure after countless repeated small flexing efforts.
I know a thing or two about fatigue failure, and your story does not surprise me one bit.
If you can I’d beg, borrow, buy or steal a Vector Network Analyser (VNA). Using a simple probe of a few loops of wire you’d be able to couple to your implant, and doing an S11 magnitude measurement if all is well you’ll see the resonant dip at around 13-14MHz or so. If nothing then the thing has gone open circuit. High end VNAs are still very expensive but you can get a cheapo Chinese thing called the NanoVNA which is perfectly adequate at HF. You could go old school and use a Grid Dip Oscillator but they are not the most accurate and a NanoVNA is probably cheaper.
2 Likes
hmmmm, this is making me less sure about getting a flexNExT now. Especially since I’d do a similar location / it costs a lot to get scalpel work done here. 
it recovers again
Just for demo
1 Like
Next pay period, I’ll definitely check out investing in one of these.
The problem is, if the NTAG is dead, the blinkies still couple. It’s not gonna tell you anything with a flexNExT, because you essentially have 4 tanks all in the same field.
To couple to the blinkies strongly you’ll need a smaller coupling coil. With a coil the size of the flex coupling to the flex will dominate. You might see some weak coupling to the blinkies but you’ll know if the main coil is working.
Do you think that’d be visible without having a picture of the response when everything was working as it should?
On a side note, for those who already have a PM3 and don’t want to invest in a VNA, I’m thinking this: one could dump the frequency response of the coil up in the air, do the same thing with the coil coupled to something, and subtract the former from the latter. It should tell you reasonably well whether a tuned circuit or a simple metallic object is in the field.
Hmm… time to crack out the PM3 and get coding 
EDIT: scratch that idea. The PM3 can only do frequency sweeps in LF mode. In HF, the FPGA only drives the coil at 13.56 MHz. Bummer…
Those things are expensive! Look at the nano vna its a bit of a toy but works well enough for an idea.
1 Like
Did you do anything that might have lead to the bitchiness of your implant? If I work a lot with my hands, I get some fluid buildup above my flexNExt, but it reads as good as before. A week or so ago, I caught the edge of the implant with my ring (very unpleasant feeling…), and since that time, the blinky in that area is a bit dimmed… not massively, but it’s visible. But it still reads fine with NFC Tools and NXP TagInfo, and opens up the link I put there when scanned with the phone.
And any idea on what may have caused this? I think a fatigue failure wouldn’t go away after some hours, so I’m really curious on what would lead to such behaviour… 
Still (and maybe I should have put that first…) I hope it starts working again… I know about Amal’s lifetime warranty, but seriously - I really doubt that I would do this procedure more often than neccessary…
You still do?? That ain’t normal.
A bit, yes - last time was some weeks ago, and the implant is about 3,5 months old now. I think it is still at a point where some kind of irritation leads to… bitchiness 
But I don’t worry too much about that. I had piercings (ear cartilage) that took a similar amount of time to superficially heal, and they were bitchy for a long time if I accidentally irritated them again (like, catching on them with my comb or sleeping on them in a way they simply didn’t like). So I’m pretty patient with my mods - I usually consider a piercing fully healed after a year.
Or I’m just used to healing bad… dunno 
If you do end up getting a NanoVNA, here’s a tutorial for how to configure it to detect implants.
3 Likes
I don’t want to derail this here thread. But I wonder if it has something to do with your installing it in your hand. I know another person who implanted a big flex implant at the same place and he couldn’t get rid of the edema neither (ended up getting rid of the implant itself actually).
A hand moves and changes shape a lot more than an arm. And in relation to Ottomagne’s problem, at least it’s comforting to know yours is still alive and kicking despite the amount of flexing it’s doing there.