Hacking the Humane AI Pin

Summary

Skip to the technical stuffShutdown announcementOn February 18, 2025, Humane announced it would be shutting down all services for the always online Humane Ai Pin in ten days, following a sale to HP. I had been vaguely aware of the Ai Pin, definitely more so than the average tech person, as I have a close friend who was one of the earliest adopters and eventually joined the Humane team to actively work on the device, but I ultimately knew little about them. I did know that they were small, ran Android, had good industrial design, and had a cool laser. I also have dreamt of a personal, local always listening device since I was a young teenager. I was a little more confident in my ability to help shape a niche device’s ecosystem after my experiences driving the Analogue Pocket’s growth, so I decided to go looking for disgruntled users looking to sell their devices.Courtesy Humane Press KitI relatively quickly was able to secure two Pins, three boosters, and a charging “egg” from Reddit for a total of $300 (a price that I originally thought might be too much, though I would later see them selling for $300-500 each). One of my Pins was supposed to be locked (no code from a previous owner), so possibly unusable, but that was OK, as we were here to learn and break things. I paid for expedited shipping so I could get the devices before the shutdown. Unfortunately for me, my two Pins arrived on the fated shutdown day February 28th… …about 2 hours after the servers were shut off. There was a big community call on the Humane community Discord server (they called themselves reHumane) counting down as the servers were turned off. Some big fans and current/previous Humane employees spoke about their experiences with the Ai Pin. I found it to be a weird experience overall, but it was interesting to see how passionate people were about these devices. Unfortunately with the devices I had purchased, the “working” device had been factory reset. Turns out that without Humane’...