Build the Night Vision Goggles You’ve Always Wanted for $100 with Raspberry Pi

In Jurassic Park, there is a scene right before the T-rex first attacks where Tim finds a pair of night vision goggles in the back of the Ford Explorer they’re riding in. Instantly, every kid who was watching the movie wanted a pair, but as Gennaro says, “Are they heavy? Then they’re expensive, put ’em back.” Luckily for the child in all of us, technology has come a long way since 1993, and you can now build a set of night vision goggles for less than $100 using a Raspberry Pi.

Redditor Mtnbikerdunn came up with the idea in a dream — probably about Jurassic Park — and set out to make the goggles an affordable reality. He started with an inexpensive FPV headset that’s intended for flying a drone in first-person. The headset has a 5" 720p LCD inside that accepts input via HDMI, so he was able to connect that directly to a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The environment is lit with infrared LEDs, and a infrared camera module passes a video feed to the Raspberry Pi and then out to the headset.

To cut down latency and extend battery life as much as possible, Mtnbikerdunn slimmed down Raspbian Stretch Lite to remove anything that wasn’t necessary for the project to work. The headset’s built-in battery is the factor limiting how long the goggles can be used, but Mtnbikerdunn reports that he still gets about 3 hours of run time before needing to recharge. If you’ve been jonesing for night vision goggles since you first saw Jurassic Park, this is a great build to emulate.