A 16-year-old builds the world’s first transparent ‘OLED’ Smart Glasses for his school science fair. He decided to take things up a notch and create his pair of smart glasses.
Mars Kapadia is a young engineer who has just shown off the world’s first Transparent OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) smart glasses on a video he shared on YouTube. The project which went on to place in the state competition uses a transparent OLED display to show info from Retro Watch software running on an Android smartphone. The smart glass is controlled by an Arduino Nano Every, which is an evolution of the traditional Arduino Nano, while an HC-05 Bluetooth module allows it to connect to the mobile app and an SF10 lithium-polymer battery gives the power running in parallel. Kapadia explains his reason to run in parallel is that he will be able to achieve more charging cycles and he will be able to have an even weight reduction based on the glasses.
One interesting feature is that in the outdoor environment, the darkened lenses can be flipped down for sun protection and simply flipped up to offer easy viewing in darker areas make the device useful at any time of day. Kapadia illustrates on the technology and the working of his glass in his video on YouTube. He shares how he worked open source to avoid the high price of private APIs and developer keys.
Mars Kapadia chose the accessible Arduino Nano Every for his TOLED smart glasses as it supports the SPI and ULAGIC video library. The smart glasses use Bluetooth LE (low energy) to transfer a low data rate at the same time as not sapping too much energy, making it suitable for wearable technology. It is an impressive display of technology building from someone apt to go far in the tech world.
In a Reddit post, he stated that he took 3 months to build the glass that he presented at his local science fair. He also revealed to one commenter that his glasses probably won’t be mass-produced soon as he is only 16 right now. He will be working on a new version of his glass in which he aims to run Android on his wearable device.
