Matt Desmarais' PiGlass V2 Is a "10-Minute" Wearable Computer Built Around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
Designed to mimic the ill-fated Google Glass, this wearable streams, captures, shows movies, and even plays games — on your face.
UPDATE (11/19/2021): Matt Desmarais has now published the promised build guide for the PiGlass V2 project, offering a choice of mono or stereo audio via bone transducers, a mounting approach which is heavy on the cable ties and paperclips — and, as promised, a fully-functional wearable computer which you can build in around ten minutes.
It does, however, come with a warning: "[You should] carefully put it on your head," Desmarais says. "If you have 2 bone conduction transducers this may be difficult and if you try to force it you may break the transducers, You have been warned."
The build guide is available on Desmarais' website.
Original article continues below.
Maker Matt Desmarais has turned the recently-launched Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W into a wearable computer system for everything from gaming to video streaming, pairing it with a Vufine+ display and bone conduction audio.
Launched last last month, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a considerably upgrade over its predecessor. It boasts a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics processor, 512MB of RAM, and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity — and, impressively, idles at roughly the same power draw as the single-core original Pi Zero W. That feature in particular, combined with its small footprint, makes it a tempting upgrade for wearable projects — like Desmarais' PiGlass V2.
Designed to mimic the functionality of the Google Glass, the PiGlass V2 combines a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with a Vufine+ display mounted to a pair of safety glasses, a bone conduction audio system, and an 8bitdo Bluetooth gamepad for control. "I can run RetroPie for games, Kodi for home entertainment," Desmarais explains. "I wrote a button program, launcher program, and camera program."
To add extra functionality, the PiGlass V2 includes an Adafruit Pi Zero Spy Cam, which mounts on the front of the glasses frame to provide image and video capture — and, impressively enough, live-streaming to YouTube or another video sharing site. A Waveshare WM8960 HAT works around the lack of quality analogue audio output on the Raspberry Pi range, too, connecting to the bone conduction transducers for private stereo audio.
Desmarais is still in the process of writing a build guide for the project — "If someone has all the parts handy," he claims, "this is about a 10 minute build" — but has already put up a brief overview and parts list on the project website and dumped the Python-based software on GitHub under the permissive MIT License.