Freeform Wearable LED Glasses Display LMFAO-Style Messages

The popularity of freeform electronic circuits exploded a couple of years ago, probably as a result of the proliferation of professional and affordable PCBs. In a time when any maker could have beautiful PCBs fabricated for their projects, it became hip to revive the art of dead bug wiring. So we saw dozens of intricate, hand-crafted freeform electronic sculptures. The freeform frenzy has died down, but many makers are keeping the art alive. For example, Deepak Khatri created these gorgeous freeform, wearable LED matrix glasses that display scrolling messages.

LED matrices are very common electronic components, but they typically come packaged in prefabricated panels. Even a modest 32x32 pixel LED matrix has 1,024 individual LEDs and soldering those all by hand would be quite the laborious task. But a bit of hard work didn't faze Khatri. His LED matrix glasses feature 144 3mm LEDs. Instead of a rectangular grid, those LEDs form a pair of glasses. The pitch of the LEDs is wide enough that the wearer can see through the gaps between the LEDs. The strength of the soldered connections is enough to provide structural integrity when attached to lens-free frames.

Khatri started by drawing out the LED locations on a piece of graph paper. He then taped that graph paper onto some cardboard and used the markings to poke holes. That gave him a template to arrange the LEDs. From there, he soldered the legs of the LEDs together to create the rows and columns of the LED matrix. A few strips of wire on the lower rows formed the bridge of the glasses. A coating of epoxy protected the circuit. Any microcontroller will work and Khatri doesn't specify which he used, but he did use four 74HC595 shift registers as I/O expanders. Power comes from a tiny LiPo battery through a TP4056 module.

He used a spreadsheet to describe the positions of the LEDs and number them, which helped him to program the scrolling messages. In the bottom row, for instance, there is a large gap between LED 140 and LED 141. That had to be taken into account to avoid a distorted image. As you can see, the results are great. There are enough pixels to display readable text and even basic graphics. We think it's great to see freeform sculptures combined with wearables like this.