Introducing Arduglasses
Transparent OLED Lensed PCB Framed Arduboy compatible smart glasses.
Ever since I discovered these transparent OLED a couple years ago, I’ve been wanting to turn them into glasses! When I first tried I could not get them to work, and it was only until I saw a post by Sean Hodgins on twitter about his success with them did I pick the project back up.
The glasses are made out of printed circuit boards from OSH Park. The electronics driving the two displays are entirely on the right side stem of the glasses along with a small 100mAh rechargeable battery that will run the glasses for a little more than an hour. The left side stem is the same PCB, just unpopulated.
The glass OLED displays are sandwiched between two PCB frames and the flexible connector for each display is wrapped around the top side of the glasses into a ZIF connector. The frames are electrically connected to the stem with a small flex circuit, also from OSH Park.
These are powered by the same technology as the Arduboy with the ATmega 32u4 and has all the same pinout so it can run any Arduboy game. It’s got a small joystick that clicks along with another button to give you all the input capability.
The frames and the stem are connected together with a small hinge that is meant for jewelry boxes and other small crafts like that, but has been adapted for cyber purposes.
The two OLED are on the same SPI bus and have separate chip select lines to draw different content to each display, although I’m only using that mode in one demo for simplicity sake.
You can see through the display too, it’s just a little tinted and blurry. Even with the blue LED in your eyes it isn’t too bright you can still see. It’s not practical for every day use, but that should be obvious. But it’s easily something that could be worn around a maker faire if such things still existed.
There are absolutely no plans to put this into production but if there is enough interest I’ll work on open sourcing them and sharing the design files. I will not be selling these in a kit, this is all pretty standard stuff you can order online if you wanted to replicate them or improve on the design.
And of course big thanks to everyone in the community especially @mr.blinky as he helped give lots of support on this project and I used his board package to enable the SSD1309 mode needed for running the Arduboy games on it. And thanks to @taniguchi for his Me is Eye game which is perfect for the glasses!
If you have any questions, ask them below happy to hear your feedback too!
