Now days, small OLED displays are an absolute must-have in the modern parts bin, so what better way to show your allegiance to the maker movement than with a pair of Arduino-compatible OLED glasses? Created by Arduboy, these digital spectacles might not help you see any better. In fact, you’ll see a bit worse — but they’ll certainly make you stand out in the crowd at the next hacker con. (Whenever we can have one of those again, anyway.) The key to this project is a pair of transparent CrystalFonts OLED displays, just like the ones [Sean Hodgins] recently used to produce his gorgeous volumetric display. In fact, [Kevin] says it was his success with these displays that inspired him to pursue his own project. With some clever PCB design, he came up with some boards merged together with jewelry box hinges.
The glasses are made out of printed circuit boards from. 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. he 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.
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 has 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, althoughhe is 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. But, can your eyes focus that close? For sure NOT. But others could see the text or pictures from outside, right?
He has absolutely no plans to put this into production but if there is enough interest he would work on open sourcing them and sharing the design files. he won't 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, he said. And of course, he wanted to thank to everyone in the community especially @mr.blinky as his help was a lot of support on this project and he used his board package to enable the SSD1309 mode needed for running the Arduboy games on it.
