Transparent OLED Smart Glasses

• Transparent OLED
• OLED Breakout Board
• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Adafruit DS3231 RTC module
• 3.7v 300mAh battery
• TP4056 battery charge protection circuit
• Fresnel magnifying lenses
• Glasses

Connections

These glasses are running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W using the I2C interface. Four wires are soldered from Pi pins 1, 3, 5, and 6 to the 3.3v, D1, D0, and GND pins respectively on the Crystalfontz CFA 10105 breakout board. The same four pins are also connected to an Adafruit real time clock to maintain time, even when the glasses are turned off.

On the breakout board, jumper pins SDA=SDA and BS1=1 are soldered for I2C interface. The male pin headers were desoldered from the breakout board for a lower-profile design, and also so that the PCB could sit next to my face without poking me.

The breakout board is then connected to the Crystalfontz transparent OLED display.

The RPi also has pins 14 and 16 soldered to a small normally-open push button to allow for various GPIO stuff, such as killing and starting the python script which displays the time and date.

Power

For power, a 3.7v 300mAh LiPo soldered to a TP4056 charge protection module is then soldered to the pads on the back of the RPi behind the micro-USB power port.

Optics

To see the display itself, some optical magnification was needed as our eyeballs cannot focus on anything this close to our face. I used eight total Fresnel magnifying lenses, with four layered on the inside of the glasses, four more layered on the outside of the glasses, and then finally the transparent OLED outside of that.

Magnifiers are most effective when there is some distance between the magnifier and the thing you want to see, so there are about 7mm between the two Fresnel groupings, and another 7 between the Fresnel and the OLED. The
number of Fresnel lenses used and the distance needed between the three layers will probably be very different if you wear corrective glasses.

Viewability of the display itself is crystal clear, but because I have essentially made a fixed focal length lens to view it, everything past the display is very blurry. A bit like wearing a very strong prescription pair of glasses if you have 20/20 vision, or vice versa if you don’t.