These Pico-Powered Smart Glasses Capture Images and Wirelessly Transmit Them
This special pair of custom glasses contains an RP2040 chip from Raspberry Pi and a tiny camera module, along with Bluetooth connectivity.
As part of their job, Redditor u/BubbleMagic45, along with their team of coworkers, were tasked with creating a set of smart glasses that could both capture images and use machine learning to recognize certain objects within each photo.
Gathering the hardware
At the core of this project sits an Arducam Pico4ML-BLE Dev Kit that comes with some quite impressive specifications. It is based on the RP2040 chip (the same one that is in the Pico) from Raspberry Pi, which means incoming images can be processed quickly owing to the RP2040's 133MHz dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of onboard flash. Apart from the microcontroller, the kit also has the common HiMax HM01B0 camera module that outputs images with a resolution of up to 320 by 240 pixels at 60 frames per second over the SPI bus. Lastly, the board has a Bluetooth 5.0 module which allows it to send high-throughput data to a client device. Power is provided by a small 3.7V LiPo battery cell and a single push button can be pressed to snap a picture.
Design and fabrication
The inspiration for the smart glass frames' angular design came from the desire for a futuristic "Cyberpunk" aesthetic. Currently, the glasses themselves don't contain any lenses to make the prototyping process faster. After 3D printing the frames, the team mounted each component, including the Arducam Pico4ML-BLE board, the battery, and the push button.
Capturing, viewing, and processing images
In order to capture a picture, the user presses the button on the top-right side of the glasses which, in turn, executes a function in the code that reads the current frame from the camera module. Once the data is stored within a buffer, it gets sent to both the dev kit's external rear display for debugging purposes and via Bluetooth to a phone running a custom mobile app that parses the data back into an image. The phone then uploads the image to an AWS S3 bucket where another service performs the object recognition task.
Future use-cases
For now, this set of Pico smart glasses is still in the early prototyping phase, but the team plans on using it as an assistive device that allows the visually impaired to know both what objects are nearby and where they are located. You can view BubbleMagic45's post here on Reddit for more details.