I'm curious about the level of expertise you need in order to do this. I also have a cheap bracelet and I wanted to do the same thing, but reading this article seems like you need to be an expert in electronics/lowlevelprogramming.

Hi, author here. I can honestly say that I’m definitely not an expert. I tried to systematically write down questions on a text file and solve them one after the other. Solving one usually added a few other ones. “What chip is this?”, “how to program this chip?”, “do I need a development board?”, “what’s SWD?”, “how to pull an output high?” Etc. Lots of these are specific to this chip, too, so a lot of it is just reading the documentations and drilling down on libraries.

It’s something I find refreshing to read and like to state when I can: none of this was easy for me. But it was definitely fun. Having no deadlines helps. Having no practical goal and just enjoying the process was also refreshingly nice.

Hi author, nice hacking and writeup!. Nordic employee here. Note that if instead of the SoftDevice and the SDK you would've used Zephyr then you'd be able to do the same you did but with a fully open source software stack, including all layers of the BLE protocol stack. More here https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr