DIY Google Glass from Adafruit

I can’t get enough of these 3D printed Adafruit projects! Those most exciting so far, to me, has been the 3D printed Daft Punk helmet, but that doesn’t mean that Adafruit’s 3D printed Google Glass isn’t equally impressive.

Adafruit’s Noe Ruiz has released a DIY tutorial for creating a “DIY Wearable Pi with Near-Eye Video Glasses”, which is non-infringement speak for “DIY Google Glass”. In it, Ruiz goes through the process of 3D printing and configuring a tiny video display that can be hooked onto ordinary prescription glasses. In the end, they may not be quite as sleek as the tech’s giant’s face computer, but, when you’re wearing a computer on your face, who really cares?

The whole project will cost about $100, which includes the purchase of a Raspberry Pi, a Miniature WIreless USB Keyboard with Touchpad, and NTSC/PAL Video Glasses, which includes all of the video hardware for your DIY glass. The first step in this tutorial involves disassembling the video glasses, in order to remove the video display, the video processing and power circuits, that include the USB port and audio input jacks.

Then, you 3D print an enclosure for the display and, extending the wires of the display’s circuits, assemble everything into a compact device, capable of attaching to Ruiz’s glasses. To attach them to your own, you may have to modify the CAD files for the enclosure, available at Thingiverse.

The display can then be connected with AV composite cables to any device, specifically, the Raspberry Pi in the Adafruit tutorial. See their video below:

A pretty cheap alternative to Google Glass, and if you prefer to look like an 80’s cyborg to a futurist from 2010, a cooler one, too.