The first “wearable” computer I ever tried was a wrist-strap that let me wear my Palm Pilot like a huge, ungainly wristwatch; I tethered it with a thick cable to a CDMA phone that could emulate a 9600 baud modem and used it to dial into the WELL.
It was pretty great.
Nick Matantsev’s Arduino-powered wearable VT 100 terminal is a good candidate for replacing that ungainly, bizarre rig. The 1″ display does some cool sub-pixel hacking to get 64 rows of characters (2 pixels/character). You need a separate wireless keyboard to do input, but maybe with the right touchscreen it would accept Graffiti input.
The TinTTY hardware setup is simple:* Arduino Uno
* TFT screen (1in x 1in ILI9163C), connected via SPI
* USB Host Shield, connected via SPI
* cheap mini 2.4GHz wireless USB keyboardThe input device, by its nature, cannot be too miniature, otherwise it becomes too annoying to type! However, everything else should basically fit onto some sort of wearable wristband or inside a cute tin container. The separate wireless keyboard helps keep the hardware tidy and self-contained.
Stretch goals:
* explore different keyboard connection approaches
* Lego enclosure?
* wearable form factor?
* glasses mount?
Tiny Wearable 8-bit VT100 Console
[Nick Matantsev/Hackaday]