Building Head Up Display Glasses

Arduino, Wearable Leave a comment

This toy has been around for a long time. I remember wanting this specific toy when I was a child. I was surprised to see that it was still being sold. I was more in wonder as to why no other toy company (that I know of) has modified their spy glasses as I have and sold it as such. Not to say that what I did was worth selling, but I feel the underlying idea and technology would certainly be coveted by the kids. High technologies of this sort have been out for a few years now (think Google Glass), and even more high tech forms exist in fictional media, like E.D.I.T.H in Spiderman Far From Home, and in military application, with helmet mounted displays.

One Youtube even made a series of videos attempting to replicate the E.D.I.T.H glasses:

I learned of the transparent OLED from his video. I didn’t want to make E.D.I.T.H. My purpose was to bring that old toy that I wanted as a kid up to date. So instead of a magnifying attachment I would add the transparent OLED for a heads up display.

Parts:

Tools:

  • Soldering Iron & Solder
  • Needle Nose Pliers
  • Hot Glue Gun
  • Dremel
  • Philips Head Screw Driver

Software:

  • Arduino IDE
  • CircuitPlayground Library
  • U8g2 Library

As with most of my builds, I had a plan in my head, but ended up improvising most of the way. It turned out that the magnifying parts came quite in handy for the final setup. Also like most of my builds, most of the time was spent generating the code to run the setup. There was little to no code, comments, or community to assist with driving the display. After a few hours of digging the internet I found that the U8g2 u8x8 library that drive many Arduino displays works, with some tinkering, with this display. I found it easier to use than the library provided at Sparkfun.

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