[Gal Pavlin] admits to enjoying the occasional dance music show. For those who have never been to one, LED one-upmanship at these shows is a real and terrible thing, so much so that an entire market exists around it. To that end, [Gal] built a pretty spiffy set of LED glasses.
It took quite a bit of work to arrive at the final design. All the circuitry and LEDs fit entirely within the envelope of the lenses on a pair of sunglass frames of dubious parentage. The batteries squeeze in between the user’s head and temples.
On top of the clever packaging is an equally impressive set of features. Each lens is a matrix of 69 LEDs. They have an accelerometer, a microphone, and a light sensor. There’s even a vibrating alert motor, which we feel is just showing off. Best of all, you can actually see through the glasses, thanks to clever layout and very tiny LEDs.
The device requires a tag connect or soldering on a pigtail to program. If you’d like to build one yourself all the files are available on [Gavin]’s site. There’s a video of it in operation after the break.
“Hello, this is Sir Elton John. Put me three dozens of them”
These professionally made and well polished ‘hacks’ are making me feel somewhat antiquated!
+3 for execution, presentation and quality!
I was planning on making a Wrench cosplay from Watchdogs 2 using a pair of glasses like these but I could never find where to buy them. My alternative was to try and make it out of flex board and this actually looks perfect. I was getting a bit overwhelmed about the board design but this is easily accessible!
Just in time for the game launch. All I have to learn now is flex board milling.
Aww man! I want!
Nice ‘shades’. B-)
I see a new marketing slogan on the horizon:
“256 shades of RGB”…
LOL.
However, IMHO these glasses are well executed in design (from the picture + sources. Haven’t looked at the video yet though…)
An idea though would be reusing some tinted glass/perspex for hiding the LEDs. Walks into party and everyone thinks they’re plain old sunglasses….. Until the light show of course (something, something, self blinding reflections are some issues that come to mind).
That was my first thought, too. They probably would make good stage glasses for a Daft-Punk-esque act as is.
I think one of the benefits of the current design is that the eyes behind the LEDs don’t see the LEDs, if you put glass in front of the LEDs you’d have some horrible reflections going backwards.
Cast the whole thing inside a block of tinted plastic, so that all the reflections are internal? Bonus, if the edges are exposed, light comes out there, lighting up the perimeter of the lenses.
I LOVE seeing other hackers creations at shows!
I can only describe these as nifty! Or maybe king cool. And I’ll bet with these you can see up close without reading glasses. Close-up without lenses (and plenty of light).
You can see through Garret Mace’s LED Matrix Shades and he started selling those like four years ago…
http://macetech.com/store/index.php?products_id=48
I like that Mace has RGB shades too, but imho, they look pretty ugly compared to the design from gavin. I’d say the design here with using a normal frame and pcbs that fit makes for a way better look overall.
What good are glasses that don’t look good? ;)
We went with all-PCB construction because I was worried about sudden design changes or availability of plastic frames, and not rich enough to do custom injection molds for plastic frames. This way, we control all the production elements from end to end. Otherwise you have to re-spin the PCBs each time the frames change, or buy many thousand sunglasses up front hoping to never run out.
Now replace the LEDs with infrared (IR) LEDs and you could make a fortune…
How? By blinding low-quality camera sensors?
</joke went over my head>