hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1235.txt

Episode: 1235
Title: HPR1235: Talk Cyberpunk To Me
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1235/hpr1235.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:02:15

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Hello everybody, my name is Sikflub, Sikflub is in a slobble that is, and I am here to
talk to you about a World Book computer that I built, quote unquote, built that I constructed
more or less, out of ready made parts.
I was given a couple of raspberry pies, and I didn't really know what to do with them
for a long time.
I found a use for at least one of them, and that is in a wearable computer.
So I have a raspberry pie in it.
I also have a half of my view solo in there, as well as four deep batteries charging the
whole thing in a keyboard.
So this is what I wear.
I wear the computer bits, the raspberry pie and the battery and why not.
I wear the computer bits kind of like a tie, which I find is nice to have it just on
your front, and where the my view solo parts on my eyes are on one eye rather, and I type
on the keyboard.
So it's pretty straightforward how this works as a wearable computer.
I'll talk to you about a couple of things that I've learned while taking apart the
my view solo to plot the pieces and use half of it.
The my view solo is a heads up display that was intended for use with the iPad and the
iPod and the iPhone and whatnot to turn its composite video out into a display that you
had presented right in front of you through these awkward looking goggles that you'd wear.
The awkward rockward looking goggles actually has two very tiny LCDs that they're 320
by 240, these LCDs, and so my goal was to extract one of them, because I wanted a sort
of a monical, I thought it looked a little bit more visually pleasing.
If I had just one eye covered instead of both, so I took it apart, and it was a bit
difficult to take apart because it's held together, the headset part of it, there are
three parts, there's the headset part of it, there's a little oval shaped box on the
wire of it with brightness and contrast controls and a power button, and then there's the
part that plugs into the iPad or iPod or whatever.
The part that plugs into the iPad or iPod or whatever is detachable, this is important,
I'll tell you why it's important in a second.
So I was taking apart the goggles and I didn't have torque screws, it's held together
by four, very tiny torque screws, I didn't have a torque wrench or torque screwdriver or
anything like that to take apart, so I very carefully wedged the whole thing apart.
With a couple of butternives, so it's, I can't put the packaging back together, but found
out that the inoids of it were pretty cool, the optics for the left eye and the right
eye are connected, which is unfortunate, because I just wanted one eye, you'll find that
the optics are connected in this little box with the LCDs on either side, you can just
go ahead and cut that box right in half, there's nothing really inside of it, and that's
exactly what I did was I cut in half and used only one side of it for my iPads.
The only, the unfortunate part about taking this part I found was that, so you have LCDs
on either side of the optics and LCDs on either side of the optics, and these are, what
illuminates the screen is LEDs behind the LCDs, and I found that these LEDs are connected,
you can't disconnect one and have the other one work, unfortunately, so I kept one connected
and kind of hit it by the earpiece, and because I suppose they're in series in some way or
something like that, another problem with the, might be solo, is you can't power it
constantly with the external source without it charging, if you, the part that has a little
oval with the contrast and brightness controls, has a tiny battery inside of it, and also
has a USB plug, you charge it with the USB plug, and it charges the battery, but you can't
turn it on, it'll turn on for a few seconds and turn off and discover that the battery's
there and charge it, so if you just remove the battery, then you can charge it with an
external source, so that's what I did was remove the battery, the part that connects the
iPod or iPad or whatever actually disconnects, and there's a stereo plug, well it's not
stereo, there's three tips in a shield, so it's one source more than stereo, so it's a
triple or something like that, I don't know what you call it, but it's this plug, and I found
that the first two tips is the audio, the next tip is the AV ground, and the shield, for
some other reason the shield is video, which is kind of odd, that's the way they made it,
and you can connect this to any NTSC or PAL video source, I chose the NTSC video out of
my Raspberry Pi, and it works quite well, although you can't really see anything because it's
320x240 display, I'll talk about that in a second, I'll actually talk about that now, I
wrote a terminal emulator for it that kind of zooms into what you're typing, and zooms
in around the screen, so you can actually see what's going on, and that link is in the
show notes, and runs, not quite as smooth on the Raspberry Pi, it doesn't a normal computer,
but it's smooth enough, so far it still has yet to be optimized, terribly much, I mean
it's algorithmically optimized, I think, but it can use some arm-ish assembly in there
and its inner loops for a little bit more optimization, so on to power, the entire thing is powered
by 4D cell batteries, I powered the Raspberry Pi directly, the Raspberry Pi has a little
5 volt regulator attached very closely to its power source, and so you can go over and
under the target voltage, and target amperage a little bit without disturbing the Raspberry
Pi too much, and so the 6 volts that I draw out of the D batteries is enough to power
the Raspberry Pi, then I powered the MyView, and the other per hit fields, the wireless keyboard
and whatnot, through the USB plugs, and yeah, so that's it, that's my little wearable computer,
it's been very nice, I've been wearing it around town, with a little keyboard, and gotten
mixed reactions from it, I think it's still socially in acceptable to have a screen attached
to you, unfortunately this is, it's a screener smaller, I think it would be a little bit more
socially acceptable, but there's a certain click of people that find it really interesting, I've
not found, so yeah, that's it, thanks for listening everyone, take care, bye-bye.
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