PiGlass v2: A wearable Pi Zero 2 | Hacker News Reader

PiGlass v2: A wearable Pi Zero 2

learn.adafruit.com

167 pointsmatt858839 comments

Great, only the vufine displays this sort of thing wants seem to be unobtainium, let alone the pi itself. Fine if you've already got both lying around...

Micro OLED displays are quite rare but probably still obtainable. If someone is interested I can help you grab some.

Edit: Now I see the vufine displays have optics built in maybe that is the harder part to source. Not sure how feasible it is with off-the-shelf optics.

What's the deal with those Vufine displays? Are they any good? I have never heard of them before this article, and now that I'm trying to find a reliable review so I can take a look at what you actually see but I'm struggling

It is... niche. The display, in spite of butting up against your glasses, is still very small. You're not going to be programming on the command line with one of them (I've tried). It's also not really great as a secondary display either. At least for me, refocusing my eye on the vufine screen and back to the main display isn't faster than switching virtual desktops.

The applications where these do well generally involve large text or video... AR apps like navigation, or watching TV while traveling.

I can use the cli just fine. I'm not using x, that was probably your issue

Oooh, I have one. It is really amazing, in that there's really a usable display in a package the size of one's finger.

I've struggled to use it for anything practical, though, because of small issues with the mounting. It isn't quite adjustable enough so it's slightly out of focus. It's a too heavy so it's tilting the glasses and making them fall off if I tilt my head forward. The micro-HDMI cable interferes if I rest my head on anything. So I pretty much have to use it sitting or standing in free space, in which case, why not use a regular monitor?

I wonder if Thunderbolt makes it possible to take another crack at this design without the battery, hugely reducing the weight.

Lol I found the almost exact same display from an e-waste shop. 960x540 resolution with optics but with analog video input instead of HDMI. I have put it on my store. Ring me up if you wanna get one.

https://maimon.shop/products/0-24-960x540-60hz-micro-display

Now if only PI Zero 2 were available… I need 3.

https://rpilocator.com

Ironically this website is probably the reason rpi's are less available , people just buy them all up and resell at higher prices

Do you have any evidence of that? They were already very difficult to find before the website, and if the associated twitter account is anything to go by, a lot of people have been very successful using it to find one in stock.

I have a scraper job watching this and emailing me as soon as one becomes in-stock in the US, and yet, still, by the time I navigate to the page after receiving a notification, someone's already bought them all up.

You are not allowed to scrape / refresh more than once a minute. The RSS should be adequate for scraping, too.

I checked the website about 4 times this week and Pi Zero v2 was available at multiple occasions (at least twice). Also, during these 4 times I refreshed a couple of minutes afterwards. The Pi Zero v2 was still available when it was those minutes before it. I even verified a shop once. Same for Pi 4 but it was a lower RAM version. CM4 seem most rare.

I'm checking once every 2. Interesting that you've seen it 4 times this week- I saw 2, each time Sparkfun.

All stores listed in Europe are either sold out, or 1 per customer (which makes the shipping expensive). Guess it’s back to waiting and hoping ;)

I actually love things that are made by the hardware hacker types, but as much as I love miniature things, the only question that I can ask is... Why? I guess it's just a project for the sake of doing a project and that's okay, but I really don't think that wearable computers in the form of glasses are anything but awkward especially when they block your field of vision such as this.

I made a wearable monocular myself long ago based on a toshiba e755 usb host pda, it's only a part of the in my case left eye field. Because I also have my right eye active the brain merges both visual fields so perceived blockage is negligible. I saw a virtual transparent 640x480 screen slightly bigger then a laptop screen floating in my left front. This merging also works in favor of VR perceived sharpness. When I tinkered with a 800x600 z800 hmd long ago I noticed that because of stereoscopy I experienced it as more like 1024x768.

As to why, the computing becomes more a part of your mind and body, augmenting or modifying you. So I could have a live feed of tweets news or cryptocurrency values. So when you have that on your mind all the time, you know why you want or don't want these. Perhaps biofeedback or a text adventure or an AR game or lichess. One of the main takeaways was that I vastly preferred an bidirectional audio interface when mobile as when you walk around you are more dependent on the visual field and don't want computing interference at the same time. An audio desktop.

An audio desktop:

http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

I have tried to get into this a few times as a sighted person. The thought of walking around with a discreet input device and an earpiece with the internal representation in my head sounds wicked. I haven’t found the right setup or the time to practice.

This sounds incredible. If you can share more information, pictures, how you made it, powered it, etc. that would be a real joy to read! Thanks in advance!

Thanks for posting this. I hope my original comment didn't seem to hate-y. It's a genuine "I don't get it". But your comment really clarifies things. It also highlights one of my concerns- addiction to information.

Ever since I read Accelerando by Charles Stross (who posts here!) I've wanted a "glasses" type product. [1]

I desperately want to have in peripheral vision, my RSS feeds, and maybe a chat window. Maybe a Lynx text browser.

I don't know WHY I want it, but that's part of innovation isn't it? Finding new ways to use tools...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

Use it to read prompts in your videos eg. Zack Freedman

hold your finger tip about an inch from your eye and tell me if it blocks your vision, it becomes somewhat transparent.

As an aside I have the mini bluetooth keyboard. I use it as an external keyboard on my phone to get the on-screen keyboard away when I work on Termux. I found the keyboard both great and bad at the same time.

It's great because the size makes it ultra portable. It's slighly larger than a credit card and about 1 cm thick which means it slides easily in pockets or even a larger wallet.

The biggest disappointment to me was that it misses the 'TAB' key. It's got all the other needed keys for terminal work many you get through some 'Fn' combo, it even includes combinations to quickly type "www." or ".com" but they somehow missed 'TAB' - I still hope I'm wrong and someone magically shares a combination for this key, or maybe they come up with a v2 keyboard.

Shouldn't Ctrl-I be the same as TAB, at least in a terminal?

OMG this is it, thank you fhars! Ctrl has a dedicated key so this solution works nicely.

I can't seem to find it on the page - what's the model? (i.e. I want one, can you please tell me what I'm trying to buy:])

It's listed under 'Parts and tools' as Mini Bluetooth Keyboard – Black: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3601

Out of stock on Adafruit but seems available on Digi-Key.

Excellent, thank you! Mouser seems to have it in stock (https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Adafruit/3601?qs=0lQeLi...).

The little HUD is cute (720p res, HDMI in, $200 from amazon) but Google Glass was obnoxious enough as an Apple product. A DIY one is cringe.

I think I might understand what you're trying to say, but calling Google Glass (a specific thing) an Apple product is strange.

Whoops, accident, and I can't edit any more. Not sure how I blurred Google and Apple together. Meant Google product. Sorry.

You can only edit for I think 2 hours after posting. You get fainter when you get voted down a few points.

I think the point is that it was deliberately conspicuous - people wanted to be seen with it in order to show how they were wealthy, intelligent, geeky, etc. There's a contingent of Apple users who are the same but I do t think that's Apple's fault.

That's what turned me off of it almost right away, but on the other hand I think it's best for people to be aware of when there's a camera pointed at them, and that was pretty unmistakable with glass. The obvious downside is that people usually don't like if a stranger is pointing a camera at them, so you have to either control for the comfort of the user (not standing out) or everyone around them (not making it easy to secretly film them). Like sure, everyone has a phone that's more than capable of secretly filming things, but walking up to someone wearing glass feels the same to me as walking up to them with your phone up with the camera pointed right at them.

I've recently been interested in Rayban stories. Basically sunglasses with cameras and bone conduction speakers. I'm interested primarily because of the speakers, because earbuds don't fit my ears well, but it's still pretty obvious that they have cameras in them which makes me a little self conscious about wearing them.

Computing had always been cringe, but exemptions are made so long it makes money, by minimum amounts necessary. From Apple I to Amiga to MacBooks in Starbucks it's all it, but no one calls it for Tim Cook while he turns aluminium into gold on stage.

Google glass was especially cringe because of how it put surveillance straight into other people's personal space. Some nerd with a laptop typing away = no big deal unless she or he is keeping others from getting a seat.

Did it introduce surveillance into private spaces more than camera phones? Or ray bans that look almost like normal sunglasses but with a camera in them?

If I wanted to take pictures/videos of others I can think of many less conspicuous ways of doing it than strapping an bright orange camera with a screen that glows to my head.

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