Cutting A Wearable Display In Half Is Harder And Simpler Than It Seems

October 16, 2022 by Danie Conradie 6 Comments

In the world of hardware hacking, you sometimes spend a ridiculous amount of time debugging a problem, only to find a simple solution that was right in front of you the whole time. [Zack Freedman] got a good dose of this while building the Optigon V2, a modified Epson Moverio wearable display he uses as a teleprompter in all his videos. He prefers having the teleprompter over his left eye only, but the newer version of the Moverio would shut off both sides if one is disconnected, so [Zack] needed a workaround.

Looking for some help from above, [Zack] requested developer documentation for the display module from Epson, but got declined because he wasn’t a manufacturer or product developer. Luckily, a spec sheet available for downloaded from the Epson website did contain a lot of the information he needed. An STM32 monitored the temperature of each display module over a pair of independent I2C interfaces, and would shut down everything if it couldn’t connect to either. This led [Zack] to attempt to spoof the I2C signals with an ATmega328, but it couldn’t keep up with the 400 kHz I2C bus.

However, looking at the logs from his logic analyzer, [Zack] found that the STM32 never talked to both display modules simultaneously, even though it is capable of doing so. Both displays use the same I2C address, so [Zack] could simply connect the two I2C buses to each other with a simple interface board, effectively making the left display “spoof” the signals from the right display.

Wearable displays need some fancy optics to be practical, you can’t just stick an OLED to your face. Two other interesting projects from [Zack] are his modular mechanical keyboard and the Gridfinity 3D printed storage system.

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A three picture sequence, with the first picture being a woman in a blue lit up prom dress touching a wand to her hand, the second picture being a woman in a pink lit up dress touching a wand to her hand and the third picture being the same woman in a lit up pink prom dress holding a blue glowing star wand over her head

Be The Star Of The Evening With This Light Up Prom Dress

October 12, 2022 by Abe Connelly 8 Comments

[Kellechu] went full parent beast mode by creating a prom dress for her daughter. This incredible build is a tour-de-force of DIY crafting, combining sewing, electronics, 3D printing and programming.

The dress skirt is made of tulle that allows for the LED strip underneath to diffuse through. The top bodice is made of fiber optic fabric sewn between the fabric form with the dangling fiber optic threads grouped into bundles. The dangling fiber optic bundles were then inserted and glued into “out caps” that forced the strands to sit next to a NeoPixel LED. A 20 NeoPixel “Dots Strand” strip was strung around the waist line, affixing 12 of the NeoPixels with an “out cap” to light up the fiber optic bodice. The remaining NeoPixels were outfitted with a diffuser cap and hung lower to light up the tulle skirt portion of the dress.

A wand was 3D printed and housed with an RFM69HCW Packet Radio M0 Feather, a NeoPixel LED color ring and a TCS34725 Flora color sensor powered by a 2.2 Ah 3.7 V LiPo battery. Another RFM69HCW Packet Radio M0 Feather was placed in the dress to be able to receive messages from the wand so that the sensed color could be transmitted and the LED strip could be updated with the sensed color. The dress portion was powered by a 10 Ah 3.7 V LiPo, with the battery and electronics fitting snugly into yoga bike shorts with side pockets.

[Kellechu]’s Instructable is full of details about the process and is worth checking out. For example, [Kellechu] goes into detail about the troubles and care taken when dealing with the different media, making sure to avoid ironing the fiber optics so as not to melt the lines and experimenting with different sewing needles to limit the amount of dead fibers as collateral damage from the sewing process.

Dresses with LEDs and other lights are a big hit, as can be seen from our feature on an LED wedding dress.

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Two shots of a Thriller jacket with LED strips being worn by Louise Katzovitz, one from the front and the other from the back.

Thrills With An LED “Thriller” Jacket

October 11, 2022 by Abe Connelly 20 Comments

[Louise Katzovitz] has created a light-up jacket in the style of the jacket worn by Michael Jackson in the 1983 music video for “Thriller”. [Louise Katzovitz]’s Thriller jacket is the perfect example of combining sewing hacks and electronic hacks to make an awesome, wearable jacket.

A bomber jacket was used as the base form to layer on the sequins and LED strips. Instead of bands of metal studs, [Louise] used WS2812B 60 pixels/m LED strips. 3D-printed transparent PLA “gems” were placed on top of the LEDs to mimic the form of the metal studs in the original jacket and provide diffusion for the underlying LEDs.

Each LED strip was laid out on a piece of vinyl strip. Then, a top layer of vinyl was cut to allow each of the LEDs to poke through, with the 3D printed gems super-glued on top. The assembled LED bands are attached to the jacket by Velcro with the wiring fed behind the lining material, which can be removed easily via small hooks. The whole thing is driven by an Arduino Nano and a 5 V power bank.

With the details and process worked out, [Louise] even made a tiny version of the jacket for her dog. We’ve featured LED wearables and fashion before and [Louise]’s jacket is a great addition. These projects are perfect for anyone who wants to wow their friends this upcoming Halloween season. Video after the break!

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RatPack Is A Wearable Fit For A Rodent

October 5, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Rats are often seen as pests and vermin, but they can also do useful jobs for us, like hunting for landmines. To aid in their work, [kjwu] designed the RatPack, a wearable device that lets these valiant rats communicate with their handlers.

The heart of the build is an ESP32-CAM board, which combines the capable wireless-enabled microcontroller with a small lightweight camera. It’s paired with a TinyML machine learning board, and it’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed enclosure that serves as a backpack to fit African Giant Pouched rats.

The RatPack can provide a live video feed. However, its main purpose is to track the rat’s movements through the use of an accelerometer. This data is then fed to the machine learning subsystem, which analyzes it to detect certain gestures the rats have been trained to make. The idea is that when the rat identifies an object of interest, such as a landmine, it will perform a predetermined gesture. The RatPack would then detect this, and transmit a signal to the rat’s handlers. Given a rat’s limbs are all on the bottom of its body, this approach is useful. It’s kind of hard to ask a rat to press a button on its own back, after all.

Finding and carefully disposing of unexploded ordnance is a problem facing many societies around the world. We’re lucky in many cases that the rats are helping out with this difficult and dangerous job.

Watch on the wrist, with all the sensors facing the camera. There's a lot of them, and a lot of wires of all kinds tying everything together.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: IP00-Minus, A Daring Wearable

October 4, 2022 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

[Rob]’s IP00-Minus watch stands out on the Cyberdeck Contest project list page; it’s clear he decided to go a different path than most other hackers, and we can certainly see the advantages. For example, if there’s no case, there’s no need to redesign it each time you want to add a module — and [Rob] has added many, many modules to this watch.

Picking between regular LCD, memory LCD, and OLED displays can be a tricky decision to make when planning out your gadget, so he just added all three. The CircuitPython firmware initially attempted to resist the trio, but was eventually defeated through patching. Jokes aside, we can almost feel the joy that [Rob] must have felt after having put this watch on for the first time, and this project has some serious creative potential for a hacker.

[Rob] has been focusing on day-to-day usability first and foremost, with pleasantly clicky encoders, impeccable performance of its watch duty, unparalleled expandability, and comfortable wrist fit — it provides a feeling no commercial wearable could bring.

Out of the myriad of sensors, the air quality sensor has been the most useful so far, letting him know when to open a window or leave a particularly crowded place. The ESP32-S3 powered watch has been quite a playground for [Rob]’s software experiments, and given the sheer variety of hardware attached, we’re sure it will bring unexpected synergy-driven ideas. Plus, it’s no doubt a great conversation starter in nerd and non-nerd circles alike.

Good things happen when you give hackers a wrist-worn watch full of sensors, whether it’s a particularly impressive event badge, a modified firmware for an open source smartwatch, or a custom piece that pushes the envelope of DIY hardware.

EEG graph with activity sections highlighted, one part highlighted as "F" and other as "6"

DREEMWORK Lets You Code Morse From Inside Your Dream

October 1, 2022 by Arya Voronova 27 Comments

Lucid dreaming fascinates hackers. Every few years for over a decade now, we’ve seen a serious project dedicated to studying or taking advantage of this phenomenon, and the interest in this topic hasn’t faded still. [Michael] has contacted us to tell about a small and unconventional breakthrough that a few lucid dream hackers have accomplished — communicating in Morse code from their dream using eye movements.

These hackers are using Dreem 2 and 3 headbands, which include clinical-grade polysomnography features like EEG measurements, which is instrumental for decoding eye movements. [Michael] tells us that one of the participants, [Sebastiii], was able to transfer the letter F by looking twice to the left, then right and left again – ..-. in Morse. With an off-the-shelf headband, this information transmission method is quite accessible to anyone willing to learn Morse, and [Michael] himself is now working on an automated decoding solution. We might forget what happens in our dreams fairly quickly, but this unexpected side channel could be a good counter.

[Michael] has tipped us off to many of the projects we’ve covered, and himself has quite a history in the field. His own research into using Morse to communicate out of lucid dreams dates back as far as 2012. If your ham exam preparations have you dream in Morse, perhaps this is the perfect project to join. A lot of projects we’ve seen focus on gaining enough awareness to achieve lucidity first, like the variety of lucid dream-invoking masks we’ve covered over the years. This part being thoroughly explored, it makes sense that communication is the next frontier to be tackled.

A person sits on a couch in the background wearing a VR headset. A keyboard is on their lap and a backpack studded with antennas and cables sits in the foreground.

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Cyberpack VR

September 25, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 4 Comments

Feeling confined by the “traditional” cyberdeck form factor, [adam] decided to build something a little bigger with his Cyberpack VR. If you’ve ever dreamed of being a WiFi-equipped porcupine, then this is the cyberdeck you’ve been waiting for.

Craving the upgradability and utility of a desktop in a more portable format, [adam] took an old commuter backpack and squeezed in a Windows 11 PC, Raspberry Pi, multiple wifi networks, an ergonomic keyboard, a Quest VR headset, and enough antennas to attract the attention of the FCC. The abundance of network hardware is due to [adam]’s “new interest: a deeper understanding of wifi, and control of my own home network even if my teenage kids become hackers.”

The Quest is setup to run multiple virtual displays via Immersed, and you can relax on the couch while leaving the bag on the floor nearby with the extra long umbilical. One of the neat details of this build is repurposing the bag’s external helmet mount to attach the terminal unit when not in use. Other details we love are the toggle switches and really integrated look of the antenna connectors and USB ports. The way these elements are integrated into the bag makes it feel borderline organic – all the better for your cyborg chic.

For more WiFi backpacking goodness you may be interested in the Pwnton Pack. We’ve also covered other non-traditional cyberdecks including the Steampunk Cyberdeck and the Galdeano. If you have your own cyberdeck, you have until September 30th to submit it to our 2022 Cyberdeck Contest!