“Build your own googly eye glasses or just attach the eyes to anything you want. Everything is better with googly eyes.
Googly eyes never fail to make people smile and laugh where ever they unexpectedly show up. I first ordered some circular displays for another project but while testing them out I thought it would be fun to hook up an accelerometer and create a googly eye.
After initial positive feedback, I decided to create googly eyes glasses so that I can wear googly eyes everywhere. This project teaches you how to build your own googly eye glasses.
Like many open source projects, this one owes many thanks to others people who built the foundation upon which I started. Tod Kurt for explaining how to have multiple displays in CircuitPython, the Ruiz brothers for the 3D printable LED glasses model that I modified and Phil Burgess who had done a googly eye Arduino project that I found in the middle of my own work, that helped me understand the math involved to make the edge collisions look so much better. Links to these projects are found later.
Parts Information
The Things section lists all the parts used but there are a couple small notes about them:
- AdafruitFeather RP2040 - The microcontroller driving this project does not have to be RP2040 based. The microcontroller does need to support two SPI buses and one I2C bus (you can probably run off one SPI bus but speed may be slower. I never tested it).
- Adafruit LSM9DS1 - The reason I chose this accelerometer is simply because I had it already. Any accelerometer should work. Adafruit has a new STEMMA version of the LSM9DS1 if you wish to avoid some soldering.
- 1.28 inch TFT Round Display - These circular displays were purchased off AliExpress. They use a GC9A01 driver and have a 240x240 resolution. The code was written assuming 240x240 so if you try a different size display the size settings will need to be changed. The driver initialization is simple to swap out in CircuitPython if your display uses another driver chip. The code should run on square displays but contained in a circular shape.”