If you have an NFC card, can you slide it between your hand and the cellphone and see if the LEDs blink repeatedly?
A debit or credit card should do it too. Or a passport.
Just tested with a credit card.
Found the sweetspot and it keeps lit when the credit is positioned above it.
Got an error message on phone
In other positions, it blinks once only
Oh, I mean “above the implant”, between the cellphone and implant
Nevermind the error. It was just to see if the phone coupled with the card and switched to continuous active reading at full power.
Well, it looks to me like the bullseye has gone open circuit, and the reason why you see a single blink is because the cellphone “sees” the smaller load of the blinkies (which have their own smaller antennae) and tries to get a read, but can’t, so it goes quiet. If the bullseye coupled and responded, the cellphone would do what you observed with the credit card.
The reason I asked you if it blinked again after a few seconds is because the phone should retry to select something in the field actively. I’m surprised that it doesn’t, but maybe your phone has one of those chips that puts out weak probe pulses to detect things coming in and out of the field.
In any case, I’m fairly sure the bullseye has gone dead, sadly. Maybe someone on the forum can shed more light, but personally I can’t think of any other explanation that fits the symptoms you describe.
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Also, you might be aware that Ottomagne, another flexNExT wearer, has experienced pretty much the same issue recently. See here:
I’m starting to be a bit fearful for mine, incidentally, despite it being in my wrist and my being careful…
Wasn’t aware.
This makes me even more worried.
I can’t think of any damage to it. The only thing I can notice is this fluid above, really hoping that this is the cause of the bad reading
The only case where fluid would be an issue is if the DT bio coating had failed and your bodily fluids had leaked in. That could cause failure too, but it would likely cause a reaction in your body - which is why I asked you if you had noticed any redness or other adverse body reaction.
Fluid buildup shouldn’t be an issue for the flexNExT: that thing easily reads through 1 1/2 inches of flesh. You’d have to have a massive edema the thickness of a wrist for the implant to stop registering if it still worked.
My suggestion is, wait a bit to see what helpful information other forum dwellers can contribute, and then hit the help button on the DT website.
No signs of reaction, so pretty sure there is no leakage.
Will keep observing for the next days and go to DT help.
Thanks for the help!
My pleasure. I hate to be the bearer of bad news though. So hopefully I’m wrong and it’ll start working again soon - or you have something messed up in both your cellphones, which admittedly sounds unlikely.
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Oh, there is another thing you can try to confirm if one of the connections has failed: try pressing gently on several spots around the implant as you scan it. If one of the crossover bridge’s connections has gone flaky, you might reconnect it temporarily by pressing on it. Have you kept track of the implant’s orientation?
Asked my wife to hold the phone while I rotated my hand pressing on different spots, got no read (hope that this is a good thing as it would show a failing connection).
About the rotation, it rotated a bit during the first 2 weeks and no more rotation since then
Well, it would most likely have shown if one of those two connections had failed:
if one or both connections to the chip itself have failed (aluminum pads around the black dot on the left) I doubt pressing on em would do anything.
I asked whether you had kept track of the orientation because if you had, you would know exactly where those two spots are. Otherwise you have to hunt at random, like you did.
Sorry it didn’t yield any results. But it was worth trying.
Fyi, my install location is in the wrist like yours, not in the hand.
Oh! Sorry yes, I was thinking of someone else for some reason.
Damn, then if there is a failure rate problem with the flexNExT, it might be more general than something related to the implant location.
Mh, stop making me nervous… mine is just nice and quiet by now. I mean, it reads and all, but it’s not bitchy any more. Currently. (funny enough, one of the LED is still red instead of blue, but there might just be a vein above it…)
But I’m very surprised that by now, we already have two cases of problems or maybe even failure - I saw how Amal tortured that poor little chip in the video he made, and I was pretty sure that nothing like that would ever happen to my hand (and if it ever does, the chip will be my least concern).
But fatigue failure? I mean, Ottomagne’s is sitting on his wrist, so there is so little movement to the chip itself, that I just can’t imagine that happening… And even mine on top of my hand gets moved very little, and bends almost never (unless stupid me catches on it). How could fatigue failure happen that way?
And what other things might cause such problems?
Do you know what caused that? I get that sometimes when I work hard with my hands, did you do anything exhausting some days before?
But still, like Rosco said, fluid buildup has no effect on reading quality. Had it several times, and it always read fine.
Things can break without a real reason.
I don’t think we can really see a trend here.
I’m kinda stoked for a replacement thread where amal drops his analysis of a failure.
Nah, far too few implants to ever get a good statistic. I’m just a tad worried 
Don’t tell me those implantable thingies from a company named “Dangerous Things” aren’t perfectly safe! 
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I’m not trying to make you nervous, but I’m not exactly reassured neither. Mine is good now - dry as a bone, quiet, no pinching, no biting, functional. I’d hate to lose it too.
I’m not surprised at all. I studied fatigue failure for years in one of my previous jobs: very roughly speaking, it’s a function of deformation amplitude vs deformation cycles. Given enough cycles, you can break anything with very little deformation.
Amal showed that the chip resists one huge deformation once. It says zilch about its ability to withstand a million very small deformations. And aluminum in particular - which is what the bullseye’s antenna is made of, and what the chip is connected to - is known to have a finite fatigue life.
What worries me most is, those tags were never designed to be bent over and over constantly. Yes they’ll resist a fair amount of bending, but I doubt anybody wondered how many cycle they would resist.
Hence my not being surprised. I’m being careful with mine, but to be honest, I won’t be surprised if it fails. Maybe it’ll fail later because I saw that one coming even before implanting it, but if it’s a trend, mine will too.
About that… I’m quite surprised by the number of flexNExT wearers who still have an edema long after implanting it. In retrospect, I’m beginning to think I’m one of the lucky few with a perfectly dry implant after all 
Yeah, that!
We all knew what we got ourselves into. DT will never get a complaint from me at least.
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