Show HN: OpenStrap – use a WHOOP 4.0 band without a subscription

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OpenStrap Edge — use your WHOOP 4.0 without a subscription

Your WHOOP 4.0 doesn’t stop working when the subscription does.

Only the app goes dark. Edge pairs with the band over Bluetooth, decodes what it<br>recorded, and works out your sleep, recovery, strain and the rest —<br>entirely on your phone. No account, no subscription, and no server that ever<br>receives your health data.

Get it on iOS<br>TestFlight beta

Get it on Android<br>APK from Releases

Free and MIT licensed. Not affiliated with WHOOP.<br>Tested on WHOOP 4.0 — 5.0 / MG support is experimental.

Today

Sleep

Heart

Recap

Every screenshot is real output from a WHOOP 4.0.

It runs on your phone

The band talks to the app, the app decodes the bytes and computes every metric<br>locally, and the results are stored on the device. There&rsquo;s no server that<br>sees your health data — that isn&rsquo;t a setting, it&rsquo;s the<br>architecture.

Precisely, because &ldquo;no cloud&rdquo; gets said too loosely: GitHub Release<br>builds send anonymous crash diagnostics by default (switchable off); store<br>builds send none. Neither ever includes health data.<br>Detail &rarr;

Published methods, cited

Banister TRIMP, Cole–Kripke, Lomb–Scargle, van Hees and friends.<br>Nothing invented, no neural net guessing at WHOOP&rsquo;s formulas. You can go<br>read the paper and decide whether you trust the number.

It admits what it doesn&rsquo;t know

Every metric carries a confidence and a tier. When the data isn&rsquo;t there<br>you get a dash, not a plausible-looking guess. SpO2 and skin<br>temperature are relative-only, because that&rsquo;s what the band actually<br>gives up.

Not a WHOOP clone

Different algorithms, different numbers. They have years of research and a<br>team; this is textbook methods over a reverse-engineered byte stream. It trends<br>correctly and it&rsquo;ll tell you when you&rsquo;re under-recovered. It<br>isn&rsquo;t their secret sauce and never claims to be.

Before you install

Quit the official WHOOP app before pairing. Bluetooth only lets one app own the band at a time.

Pick one and stay on it. A firmware push from the official app could change the records this depends on, and there&rsquo;s no fixing that from here.

Not medical-grade. These are approximations from published research, not validated against a lab. Nothing here is a diagnosis.

There are bugs. It&rsquo;s a beta built by one person. Open an issue when something looks wrong — that&rsquo;s genuinely the most useful thing you can do.

How it&rsquo;s put together

band &rarr; Bluetooth &rarr; protocol decoder &rarr; local storage &rarr; analytics &rarr; the UI

edge<br>The app. Bluetooth, storage, the compute pipeline, every screen.

protocol<br>The decoders. Raw band bytes into named fields. Pure Dart, zero dependencies.

analytics<br>The math. Published, peer-reviewed methods with citations in the code.

research<br>The lab notebook. The protocol written down, plus a Python client.

Where it&rsquo;s got to

The cliff in mid-July is Hackaday and Adafruit covering it on the same day.<br>Chart generated from the GitHub API and served from this site, rather than<br>embedded from star-history.com or starchart.cc — there is no analytics or<br>third-party service on this page. (The screenshots above load from GitHub, which<br>also hosts it.)

☕ Like it? Help keep it going.

No subscription, no paywall, no company behind this. If OpenStrap gave your<br>band a second life, a small tip genuinely helps.

Bitcoin<br>bc1qvtcch38dcwp967ar764uu6eetw7tf907844wfq<br>EVM — Ethereum &middot; Base &middot; Arbitrum &middot; Optimism &middot; Polygon<br>0x8310C89393366b7eBCD47ABa82e1dfB5ECeFFbD9

Tap an address to select it. What this actually pays for: the Apple Developer<br>membership that keeps the TestFlight build alive, a second band to get<br>WHOOP 5 support tested, and coffee.<br>More &rarr;

Nothing is gated behind paying, and nothing ever will be.<br>Bug reports from real bands are worth more than money — there&rsquo;s only<br>one person&rsquo;s physiology in the test data otherwise.

rsquo whoop from band rarr subscription

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