We ran into [Garrett Mace] at Maker Faire. He wasn’t exhibiting, but in keeping with the fun he made something to show off. This pair of RGB LED Shades was assembled the night before. They may have been hacked together, but they were in no way a hack. Especially of interest to us is the hinge design which is made of PCB substrate and a few machine screws.
Our video above does a pretty good job of showing off the blinky patterns he coded. What’s surprising to us is that the wearer is almost no view of the light the specs are emitting. The slots aren’t that hard to see out of either, and they hide [Garrett’s] prescription glasses quite nicely. This pair steps up from the single color version we saw a couple of years back. That set was also on display, but you really do need to get a closer look at the newer design. Luckily it took us so long to get this video edited that the Macetech blog now has complete details.
My immediate thought:
http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/a/image/1333/25/1333250409212.jpg
The PCB hinges are clever, but what about the exposed fiberglass on the edge digging into your ears and nose?
Besides, just ditch the ear-pieces altogether and make clip-ons! Those of you not cool enough to wear prescription specs can just use sunglasses ;)
a little heat shrink tubing could fix that.
Use the LEDs to send messages.
Argh straighten those glasses! Drove me nuts.
They didn’t fit THAT well over my prescription glasses. They can be straightened but I should have worn a different pair of glasses that are a little narrower.
Combine that with a Google Glass-type camera and face-detection software to drive animated eyes that track the people in front of you. (Good for catching a few zzzzs during long meetings?)
Nice, but I would like to go with smaller LEDs to allow more vision. Yeah, I know, I would probably lose the ability to program them RGB.
He’s using the ws2812b chip. There are smaller RGB packages (2mm) but this one has all the PWM and addressing built in (5mm). It’s also rediculously cheap compared to other solutions.
love it :D
Where do you go about getting PCBs made with this kind of quality milling? I’ve never ordered from one-off fab houses as there’s just so many choices and I’ve got very little idea of the quality of the parts I’ll receive. Is the place you ordered from a small house that does one-off designs with such quality for a reasonable price?
I think many PCB houses could do this, but you’ll need to be able to talk with a live person. You’ll also have to drop the “reasonable price” requirement for low quantity….