TL;DR

Yeesh, it’s been a long time, been a pretty crazy past few years (and not just due to COVID), I haven’t really had the time to work on projects for this site, but this came my way so I figured why not throw together a quick post about it (and now I’m actually posting it a bit over a year later… *shrug*).

As a general rule I don’t like “connected” toys, there’s too many potential issues with them for my liking (for more coverage in this area I STRONGLY recommend looking at the “Internet of Dongs” project https://internetofdon.gs/), but then I’m a professional paranoiac so I suppose that shouldn’t be a huge surprise. I was somewhat intrigued when I heard about the “Little Devil” shock collar from Qiui but frankly wasn’t willing to drop the ~$AUD300 + shipping to see it for myself, happened to find one selling one eBay for $200 shipped and decided to pull the trigger.

The Collar

The collar appears to be pretty well built, and is comfortable to wear, though the horns and bat wings make it perhaps a little less discrete than it could be.

Shocks delivered by the collar are quite mild by my standards (having experience with various “real” shock collars, I’ll probably do a quick comparison post showing the difference between the Little Devil and a “real” shock collar) more irritating than painful, the positioning of the contacts means it basically causes the muscles on either side of your trachea contract causing “twitching” rather than eliciting any sort of pain response.

The lock supplied with it is a joke, it’s the kind of “lock” you’ll find on a kid’s diary but that was not unexpected. The hole in the rivet is probably large enough to get a very small travel lock through it, but I’d consider the locking aspect to be more psychological than physical.

There are three operational modes for the collar;

“Grounding” Mode

Basically motion detection, if the wearer moves out of the position they were in when the mode was activated (with a configurable threshold) they are shocked, the shock intensity increases the further out of position they get, and the shocks do not stop until they either return to their original position* or Grounding mode is exited in the app.

This is probably the best realised functionality in the device, barring the caveat below.

* Because the device uses an accelerometer to detect motion it is possible to slowly move out of position without triggering shocks, and when the wearer moves out of position an accumulated error may result in the “home” position shifting.

“Free” Mode

Allows the user of the app to trigger shocks at will, the intensity is adjustable, and there appears to be some kind of “pattern” functionality but it’s unclear how this is configured beyond the four “standard” options listed; “Soft”, “Pleasure”, “Tremor” and “Firm”.

“Crawl” Mode

In theory allows you to force the wearer to stay within a certain distance of the floor. Based on the various videos and such I saw about the device prior to release I gather their original intention was to use the accelerometer for this function, but that evidently didn’t work out as the device ships with an IR sensor which plugs into the USB port which is used for ranging.

Unfortunately the ranging is not terribly reliable (at least not on the floor surfaces I tested on), which makes this functionality less useful than it could otherwise be, which is unfortunate because for my purposes this would have been one of the main attractions of the device.

The ranging sensor is also pretty poorly made, it has the ability to adjust the angle of the sensor to account for different body positions but it doesn’t really “stay put” when you adjust it, except at the extremes of motion.

Another drawback is the inability to control how much the intensity increases based on distance changes, the difference between being at the “correct” level and say 10cm higher is barely perceptible.

The App

The first impression is that the app is EXTREMELY clunky, there’s a lot of stuff which either wasn’t translated at all or didn’t get translated properly. Many of the buttons and functions are represented by iconography which does not (to me at least) make it clear what they actually do.

The biggest issue I have with the App is that it is REQUIRED to have a network connection in order to operate the device, all the data is stored (unnecessarily) “in the cloud” i.e. if you run the app without a network connection it doesn’t even show you the toys which are configured (all of that data could and frankly SHOULD be stored locally on the device. Allowing remote control “via the cloud” is still achievable in that scenario).

In addition the app requests location permissions (I’ve discovered that this is not necessarily the app’s fault, it seems there was some change in later versions of Android that requires location be on to pair with BT devices for… reasons… something about ephemeral BLE identifiers which frankly sounds utterly stupid to me.), fortunately it only seems to do that on the first connection to a device but it is most definitely unnecessary for the operation of the device.

Also the app does not allow you to sign up with an email address, you HAVE to use a phone number, which again is entirely unnecessary and potentially more damaging in the event of a data leak.

It seems the app was primarily designed to be a “social network” type thing and the device functionality was just kinda duct taped to the side. In addition some of my more diverse audience will find the roles and genders available for selection extremely limiting.

The Good

• Well constructed.
• Comfortable to wear.
• Interesting concepts for functionality.

The Bad

• App MUST have an internet connect in order to operate the device.
• App requires signup with phone number.
• Not particularly punchy.
• Proximity sensor for “crawl” mode is not well implemented (this could probably be improved with a firmware update if the device supports that).

Conclusion

I had pretty low expectations from the outset, unfortunately actually getting my hands on the device did nothing to improve my outlook on it.

The app is pretty much a dealbreaker for me, aside from being generally clunky, it’s designed and intended to be some kind of social network thing and DOES NOT operate without an active network connection.

All in all a novel concept but I’d love to see a better implementation of it (and I’d strongly recommend against spending $AUD300 buying one). At some point I might have to break out my Ubertooth One and see if I can’t come up with a better solution for using these devices (though based on cursory examination of the network traffic that may be challenging).