Goodluckbuy, about the corniest sounding website ever? Nope! It is instead, another Aliexpress-esque market place where you can purchase cool gadgets from. My first purchase off their however was a relatively pricey one ~£70 and consisted of an attachable eye display in an all in one package!
Since the inception of Google Glass, I’ve thought of it as pretty useless, just as I do my smartwatch. I do however think they’re both cool (useless and cool don’t need to be antonyms!) and while having made a smartwatch, thought it was time to try and make some form of interactive glasses. Hopefully, I will eventually be able to make a useful pair of night vision glasses (I could probably do so easily with this display and a cheapo PAL camera, that defeats the point though and wouldn’t be at all taxing!) with some form of HUD or telemetric information. I’ve spend hours scouring the internet for eye mountable HUDs and finding this one was quite a challenge in itself but proved fruitful. I don’t actually have many devices in my house that output composite as their standard signal, like my PS1/PS2 once did. Instead, I reached out to an ancient – and may I add atrocious – Technika DVD player. The reason for this device being such an atrocity is that unless you time your button presses correctly, the DVD player gets stuck in an infinite boot loop where the VFD filaments power up and down every other second (reallllllly can’t be that healthy, right?) so unless you catch it at the right moment, you won’t get any output at all! On the plus side, it had both scart and composite video output.
So lets cut to the chase! The DVD that was in the player is one that has been there for presumably years, I’m surprised it hasn’t bio-degraded in there… (sarcasm).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The view on my tv…
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The view on the mini goodluckbuy eye!
The picture is pretty distorted on the eye version due to the fact there is a lens and I had to get the camera to focus enough to see the picture! Looking at it directly with your eye isn’t a major issue though, the quality is actually relatively good. I was powering it off my TV’s USB port so it obviously doesn’t draw more than the USB 2.0 spec (500mA @ 5V). It does however have a relatively annoying high pitched whine associated with it which I sadly believe is unavoidable (unless a couple of extra power caps might help…).
Having written an STM32F4 sketch for freerunning monochrome VGA, I’m hoping I can modify the timings to create a monochrome composite output using this circuit to combine my sync pulses. That however will need to wait until another day as I have no XOR gates…
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
