Skip to main content

Why wait for Apple or Facebook when you can build your own DIY smart glasses today?

Why wait for Apple or Facebook when you can build your own DIY smart glasses today?

/

Designer Sam March has everything you need to build your own

Share this story

Photo by Sam March

Smart glasses — depending on who you ask — are the future. But if you’d rather not wait for a company like Apple or Facebook to actually sell you a pair, you can do what product designer Sam March did and simply build your own smart glasses from scratch.

(March is no stranger to building his own wearable tech, as his DIY smartwatch from last year shows.)

Much like the smartwatch build, March has fully documented every step of the process he took in creating the glasses, which feature a connected app and use integrated LEDs to indicate walking directions to a specified location.

Photo by Sam March

If you do want to build your own pair, it will take a fair amount of technical skill. March’s process involves machining a custom pair of glasses with a CNC router (or 3D printing them), carving and polishing out a pair of lenses, writing the app, and designing — and then assembling — a custom miniaturized circuit board.

Now, the glasses are pretty limited in functionality — right now, all they do is basic navigation with the aforementioned lights to indicate turns or the final destination — but March has also made the entire project open source, offering everything from circuit board schematics and code to CAD files for the designs to the app itself. That means there’s nothing stopping you from taking his foundation and adding whatever features you want on top.

Want to try to build your own? All of the technical details can be found on March’s Github repository here.