Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses | Hacker News Reader

Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses

jfloren.net

166 pointsfloren28 comments

Very interesting! Seems like a Bluetooth-connected display is kind of rare.

This part:

The one thing I’m left scratching my head over is the length field. If I have 0x20 bytes of image data to send over, I actually need to put 0x10 into that field.

Made me think the protocol simply assumes at least 2 bytes will always be used, so it transmits the length using the unit of 16-bit "words" instead of bytes. That would not be unheard of, and is kind of smart even.

Not sure if same vein/counts, Monocle/Frame is bluetooth based

I have a Monocle! It's much worse than this device. The battery only lasts about an hour, and you can't do real images.

I have a Frame and it’s not so great, the prism interferes too much with your vision. You can do images on the Frame. I’m optimistic that Brilliant Labs latest iteration might be better - Halo. They are great at being open source and open design.

Probably the leading current product if you want HUD Bluetooth glasses are Even Realities G1s but those aren’t going to do images however they have very crisp and useable monochrome displays for text.

I used to have a monocle, I thought frame was just monocle inside glasses

I really want a display + camera + audio. Halo offers those, but the Brilliant Labs model of releasing a single run of a product and then immediately moving on to the next iteration kind of sucks -- and they're going to do it again with Halo, they've explicitly said so. If I want to build for an abandoned product, well, I've already got these Solos!

It's kinda weird since the payload seems to be (repeat:u8 + rgb565:u16)*, so always multiples of three bytes, not two.

Given how this is sort of software is usually written, my guess would be they originally didn't have the RLE encoding and were just sending (rgb565:u16)*. That'd explain it.

I'm still figuring out how to integrate this with my existing wearable system. I've been using a Vufine monocular display which is nice as a real HDMI screen but the wire is clunky. So far I'm experimenting with extending the Python code to read images from a directory and display them, newest first... from that I see a path to doing useful stuff with notifications, even turn by turn navigation.

I immediately think about combining this with a camera mounted on the glasses - I guess like Google Glass... So you see something in the real world and then you can find out more information.

Very cool hack.

As an avid cyclist I never felt the need for this, my cycle computer has everything I need at a glance anyways. But I've seen some similar googles for skiing or swimming, which I might check out more. The skiing one is mostly vanity (like knowing my speed and other stats in the moment is not that useful), but the swimming one is nice as it's hard to track how you're doing without glancing at your watch. Anyone else have experience with these kind of devices?

I have been using Active Look Engo 2 sunglasses and found them surprisingly useful for cycling. Having my power reading and heart rate right in my field of vision without having to glance down is nice. The bike computer is still there for more complex visuals like maps and navigation. Bonus points for the Engos just looking like regular sunglasses unless you carefully inspect them.

I've used and enjoyed Form goggles for swimming, but their subscription model is not to my liking.

It’s a bit of a hobby of mine to investigate wearables for HUD purposes so I have tested Engo 2 among others I would mention that something neat about Active Look’s is they publish all their Bluetooth protocol and have open source libraries to interact with their glasses.

I don’t have a pair of these Solos glasses (yet) but it looks from specs their resolution and display quality is much higher compared to Engo 2, obviously because it’s an actual microled display not prisms or waveguides.

Length being a multiple of 2 makes sense. Rgb565 means 2bytes per RLE value. Data stream is half values half lengths. So every datum is 3 bytes. So it makes sense to send number of half words. Worst case: you overlong by one byte. NBD. The alternative means sending one byte extra ALWAYS to have enough bits for length.

Improvement would be to send number of RLE datas (number of 3 byte quantities)

The project looks super cool, but the idea of wearing a sharp screen that close to my eye on a bike could be one reason it didn't sell.

I wouldn't really have any reservations with the glasses insert in, I think it would protect well enough.

I found this yesterday https://minimis.life/ it also has cycling in mind based off their description

> If you wanted to do something useful, you could just run while true; python client.py /tmp/hud/*.png; sleep 1; done and have cron scripts generating images that get dropped into /tmp/hud.

It's a wearable version of the clockwork orange movie player! Or maybe the parallax view.

For such a low cost I'm tempted to order one.

I can immediately imagine how useful this could be for reading books (or other texts) while riding in a packed subway car. I'd only need to invent a way to control page turning without taking the phone out of the pocket; maybe by tapping, or something similar.

There are bluetooth remotes for ereaders for easy page turning.

lol I just ordered a pair - many available on eBay at this listing (same as I bought from): https://ebay.us/m/t2i9YF

Can anyone point me to the modern incarnation of Google Glass? Looking for something that provides a similar experience.

From another comment, maybe this is what you are looking for?

https://store.vufine.com/products/vufine-wearable-display-1

That's a good form factor, but Google Glass was a standalone device that didn't have a cable connection.

I can't be the only one who read the title and expected an article about Red Solo Cups right?

This is the first time I've seen the product, and I was immediately excited.. until I saw the product.

Now, I don't know what it does that my $40 smart watch doesn't do, by passing my voice to google / alexa / <choice>. I like where this is going, I just don't think that this generation has even the same features, as what I carry on my wrist, sadly.

It’s a cancelled product from 2018, you shouldn’t expect to be wowed if you’re comparing it to the current state of the wearable art.

How are you looking at a map with a $40 smart watch while riding a bike?

Sure, the high end options from apple and garmin can show maps, but you are always going to have to take a hand off the handlebar to have a good look at that tiny screen (that's why cyclists spend up to 1000$ on garmin bike computers).

There's certainly a market for a lightweight HUD and i am pretty sure some company like xreal will eventually have another shot at it.

I don't look at a map whilst riding a bike period. I don't have that want. Differently people use tech differently.

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