Voice-Controlled Magnifying Glasses

If your job requires you to look at objects with a magnifying lens or lenses, you normally need to physically flip the them down in front of your eyes, or perhaps insert an eye loop into your socket to see properly. If you need to constantly switch back from normal vision to magnified, this can be distracting, and take your hands off of your work.

As a solution to this problem, hacker Mauro Pichiliani came up with a voice-activated magnifying lens holder powered by a Raspberry Pi. His device takes a glasses frame that is meant to hold eye loops, which can be manually flipped in front of your eyes, and modifies it for control via a hobby servo motor. The lens axis is modified to allow for easier flipping, and the two loops are attached together with an ice cream stick, nail file, and plenty of hot glue.

A Python script running on the Pi is used to control the servo, and Node.js code is used to capture the audio. It then pipe commands to the Watcson speech to text service, translating the words “up” or “down” as needed. It’s an interesting idea, and certainly something that could be expanded upon.

Be sure to check it out in the video seen below!

[h/t: Raspberry Pi]