hud

20 Articles

HUD-Like Clock Is A Transparent Time Display

December 14, 2022 by 13 Comments

While we have all types of displays these days, there’s something special about those that appear to float in the air. This HUD clock from [Kiwi Bushwalker] is one such example.

The build relies on four 8×8 LED matrixes to display the four digits that make up the time, run by the MAX7219 driver chip. However, the LEDs aren’t viewed directly — that would be too simple. Instead, the matrixes shoot their light up at an angle towards a tilted piece of clear acrylic. This creates a “heads-up display” look where the numbers appear to float in the air.  The clock gets accurate time from an NTP time server over WiFi, thanks to the ESP32 microcontroller that runs the show.

It’s a straightforward clock build in many ways, but we particularly like the use of the heads-up display technique. It’s almost surprising we don’t see these projects more often, for things like car dashboard displays or targeting womp rats in a T-16 landspeeder. If you’ve been whipping up your own HUD projects, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

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Garmin HUD Got Discontinued, But Not Trashed

October 30, 2022 by 9 Comments

The Garmin HUD+ was a small Bluetooth device intended for the dashboard of a car, meant to be used as a GPS heads-up display for data from Garmin smartphone apps. It used a bright VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) which was viewed through a clear reflector, and displayed GPS information and directions. It was discontinued in 2015, but [Doz] was fond of his and used it happily until a phone upgrade meant it no longer worked. Was it destined for a landfill? Not if he had anything to say about it!

The first thing [Doz] tried was using an alternate Android app, but since it also didn’t work, it was time to sit back and reflect on the scope of the issue. In [Doz]’s case, he really only wanted some basic meaningful data displayed, and decided he could do away with the phone altogether if he had the right hardware. Continue reading “Garmin HUD Got Discontinued, But Not Trashed” →

Live Subtitles For Your Life

June 8, 2022 by 17 Comments

Personal head-up displays are a technology whose time ought by now to have come, but which notwithstanding attempts such as the Google Glass, have steadfastly refused to catch on. There’s an intriguing possibility in [Basel Saleh]’s CaptionIt project though, a head-up display that provides captions for everyday situations.

The hardware is a tiny I²C OLED screen with a reflector and a 3D-printed mount attached to a pair of glasses, and it’s claimed that it will work with almost any ARM v7 SBC, including more recent Raspberry Pi boards. It uses the vosc speech recognition toolkit to read audio from a USP audio device, with the resulting text being displayed on the screen.

The device is shown in action in the video below the break, and without trying it ourselves we can’t comment on its utility, but aside from the novelty we can see it could have a significant impact as an accessibility aid. But it’s as an electronic Babel fish coupled with translation software that we’d like to see it develop, so that inadvertent but hilarious international misunderstandings can be shared by all.

Regular readers will know that we’ve brought you plenty of HUD tomfoolery in the past.

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Arduino Car HUD Does The Job

June 3, 2020 by 17 Comments

Many cars these days come with a basic Heads Up Display, or HUD. Typically, these display speed, though some also throw in a tachometer or navigational graphics too. Of course, if your car doesn’t have one of these stock, hacking in your own is always an option.

[PowerBroker2] developed this HUD in a somewhat circuitous way, but it’s effective nonetheless. An ELM327 Bluetooth OBD-II reader is hooked up to the car, collecting data on speed and RPM. This data is passed to an ESP-32 and Teensy 3.5. From reading the code, it appears the Teensy is responsible for logging data from the CAN bus on an SD card, and running a small OLED display. The ESP32 is then charged with running the LED display that actually forms the HUD. It’s then combined with a 3D-printed housing, some plexiglass, and reflective windshield film to complete the effect.

It’s a build that probably packs in more hardware than is strictly needed to get the job done, but it does indeed get the job done. Other builds we’ve seen use LED strips as a quick and tidy way to get the job done. Video after the break. Continue reading “Arduino Car HUD Does The Job” →

The Smallest Large Display Is Projected Straight Onto Your Retina

April 15, 2020 by 42 Comments

For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one’s retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and draw directly onto our retinas?

Admittedly, the thought of aiming lasers directly at the layer of cells at the back of our eyeballs — the delicate organs which allow us to see — likely does not give one the same response as you’d have when thinking of sitting in front of a 4K, 27″ gaming display to look at the same content. Yet effectively we’d have the same photons painting the same image on our retinas. And what if it could be an 8K display, cinema-sized. Or maybe have a HUD overlay instead, like in video games?

In many ways, this concept of virtual retinal displays as they are called is almost too much like science-fiction, and yet it’s been the subject of decades of research, with increasingly more sophisticated technologies making it closer to an every day reality. Will we be ditching our displays and TVs for this technology any time soon?

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Python And Pi Provide Heads Up Display For Your Experimental Airplane

May 10, 2019 by 9 Comments

You shouldn’t be looking at screens when you’re driving, but what about a heads-up display? A screen that could put relevant information in your field of vision would be great, even more so if it used a Raspberry Pi. That’s exactly what [John] did, only he did it with an airplane.

First up, the legality of this build. [John]’s plane is registered as experimental, which, provided you know what you’re doing, is pretty close to ‘anything goes’ as you would want in a manned aircraft. [John] has a sufficient number of hours in his log book, and he’s built a Zenith 701.

For hardware, the hard part of this build is constructing a heads-up display. Fortunately, aftermarket HUDs exist, and [John] is using a Kivic projector, a $200 piece of equipment that’s readily available on Amazon. If you need a HUD for your car, there you go. The software is another thing entirely, with the goal of having the software decoupled from the display and data sources. This is somewhat easy to accomplish with a Raspberry Pi; the display is actually just some minimal text-based blocky graphics built in PyGame. This build is also decoupled from the data sources by building this as a user interface for Stratux, an independent Raspberry Pi-based ADS-B receiver for pilots.

There are several views available with this HUD, with the AHRS + ADS-B providing information on the aircraft’s attitude and altitude, along with a few indicators of the nearest planes. The traffic view expands on the ADS-B data, showing the nearest eight or so aircraft in the air, with a range, bearing, and difference in altitude. There’s a diagnostic window, and since [John]’s plane is a backcountry STOL thingamado that can hover in a strong wind, there’s also a digital version of a norden bombsight. It’s for dropping bags of flour onto a grass strip. You can check out [John]’s entire AirVenture presentation of the build below, with all the code available here.

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Iron Man Mask With A HUD!

March 25, 2018 by 12 Comments

At some point, a child will inevitably dream of being a superhero. Not all children get the chance to see that dream made manifest, but a few take that destiny into their own hands. Redditor [Lord_of_Bone] — seizing at that goal — has built himself an Iron Man mask with an integrated HUD!

Relying on a conceptually similar project he’d previously built, much of the code was rehashed for this ‘Mark II’ version. Pieces of a smartphone holo pyramid act as projection surfaces — using a lens to focus the image to be viewed at such close distances — and a pair of OLED screens displaying the information. It’s a happy bonus that the lack of backlight results in only the text showing in the user’s field of view.

Instead of speaking with J.A.R.V.I.S., [Lord_of_Bone] is using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the mask’s brain. Working past some I2C troubles between the OLED screens and an Enviro pHat required a whipped-up veroboard and a bit of hardware hacking. Cramming everything into the mask was no easy task — using Blutack and Sugru to bind them in the limited space — but the pHat had to be surface-mounted in the open anyways for atmospheric and light data.

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