How To Build Your Own Google Glass

build your own google glass wearables

The finished product

Wearing Google Glass is an amazing experience, but $1,500 is really expensive! What if you could make your own wearable computer for under $200?

This hack comes to us via Adafruit, and features a pair of those movie-screen glasses, and a Raspberry pi. The full tutorial can be found here, but we’ve summarized it for you below.

How It’s Made (A Summary)


The displays for the glasses are harvested from a pair of “video glasses” which can be had for around $110. Each one comes with two displays, so you can actually build two pairs of home-made glass for every pair you buy.

Tell Your Friends

The display is then mounted into a 3D-printed housing that is similar in design to Google Glass, along with circuit boards for controlling display. You can find the 3D file for the housing here.

Your 3D printed casing has built-in input ports, so that you can connect it via cable to any computer. For their tutorial, Adafruit used a Raspberry Pi with a USB battery pack for portability, clipped onto the wearer’s belt.

Since the OS isn’t really optimized for a tiny display, it’s probably hard to control, and not very practical, but it’s cool that you can build this nonetheless.

[The full instructions]

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Have a cool build you’d like to share? Let us know

Michael Sitver

Michael Sitver is a technology insider who has been blogging about technology since 2011. Along the way, he's interviewed founders of innovative startups, and executives from fortune 500 companies, and he's tried dozens or hundreds of gadgets. Michael has also contributed to works featured in Newsday, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the associated press. Michael also occasionally consults, and writes for Seeking Alpha and Yahoo News.

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