Super Secret Spy Glasses

I got my hands on a triggered camera assembly that supposedly takes VGA video and 720p still pictures while still being exceptionally small. So, obviously, the next logical step would be to slap them onto a pair of shades, right? Snapchat has made glasses that take pictures so why can't I? Of course it won't be as high quality and it'll save to an SD card, not my phone, but we can only hope for so much, right? So, without further ado, let's get started.

Let me lay out the components here so we can see what we're working with. If my idea is correct, this is basically all we need.

Not pictured here is the little bit of perfboard I needed and a button. Everything else is here: the camera module, the battery, its charger, and some pin headers. The AdaFruit site says the following as their only official documentation (I couldn't find the datasheet for the IC on the board, either):

"We don't have a real datasheet, we think these are just 'guts' of some low cost keychain camera. However, it's not too hard to use. Connect the red wire to 3.7V-5VDC and the black wire to ground. Then use the white wire to control the camera. When touched to ground for under half a second, the camera will take a photo and stick it in a PHOTO folder on the SD card, numbered from PIC000.jpg up to PIC999.jpg. The red LED will blink briefly. When the trigger wire is touched for over a half second, it will start taking a video clip with audio from the mini microphone. The LED will stay on during the entire recording. Touch it again for half a second+ to stop."

Okay, so we only need one button to pull this off. I pulled a flat button off of the smart watch I destroyed many moons ago. I then soldered one end to the signal wire and the other to ground. And I soldered the ground wires and the positive wire to two pins.

Pressing the button after plugging in the battery and adding an SD card yielded this image:

Not bad. So now with some hot glue, we can attach it to the glasses. I put the button on the sd card holder for wire management purposes, overall ease of use, and aesthetics. Everything is fastened with hot glue (except for the battery which is velcro). I even hot glued the hinges so that you can't close them and rip the camera ribbon. I'm not sure if it'll completely seize the hinges, but it'll provide enough resistance to remind me not to fold the glasses.

Looks kinda good. The battery is a smidge uncomfortable on the ear, but with the wire length it was the best place for it. So I went and took a picture of my work station and myself in the mirror. These photos have been rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

If you press and hold the button for about half a second, you can start recording a video. The camera has a little built in microphone on it, so I wanted to test the audio. The quality of the audio was okay, but it was super quiet. Here's a sample video rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise with the audio amplified 400% so you can get a better sense of the audio quality.

So yeah, that was a very simple and straight forward build. I'm really happy with how it turned out and how fast it came together. I literally just got back to my apartment a few days ago and I pulled this build together in a few hours. I've had it planned for a while but I'm glad I finally got to build it.