Meta Glasses, Day 15: I Needed a Light. So I Built One.

Glasslight

4:00

Day fifteen with the glasses....First mod was a little plastic cover I bought off Amazon — snaps over the recording LED on the frame. The light is obnoxious. It flashes when you’re recording, which is the point, but it also changes the energy of whatever you’re filming and blinks in your peripheral vision like a tiny alarm clock you can’t turn off. Cover goes on, problem solved. There’s a sensor behind it that detects the cover and disables recording if you block it wrong, so there’s a specific technique — cover the camera for the first second, release, it records clean. Fine. Moving on.

That was day two...

By day four I realized I’d covered up a light on my glasses and now I needed a light on my glasses. A real one. A functional one.

I do detail work at a desk — wiring, small components, stuff that requires you to get close and look carefully. I’ve been using Firefly for this for years: a wristlight I built because I wanted light pointed at my hands, not at the ceiling. It’s the thing Apple should have put in the first Apple Watch. They didn’t, so I built it.

The glasses changed the geometry. Your eyes lead everything. Hands follow eyes. If the light goes where your eyes go, it’s always pointed at exactly the right place without you thinking about it. Firefly on the wrist was the idea. GlassLight is the same idea, moved up six inches, pointed forward.

So at 2 AM Sunday — couldn’t sleep, parts were right there — I went for it.

What I Built

XIAO ESP32-C6. One WS2812B LED. Three buttons. A 260mAh LiPo. A 3D printed clip that mounts to the frame. One afternoon of hardware, one late night of firmware, one morning of calibration.

Is this 80% built for no reason? Yeah, honestly. It was 2 AM and I couldn’t sleep and this is what happens. But it works, and when I’m doing close work at the desk with the glasses on, it’s genuinely useful in a way that’s hard to explain until you try it. The light goes exactly where you’re looking. Every time. Without thinking about it.

The firmware ended up fuller than I expected. Seven colors. Three physical buttons — next, previous, on/off toggle. Hold the toggle three seconds, WiFi config mode kicks in, captive portal opens on your phone.

Adjust color, brightness, auto-shutoff. No app, no cloud, no subscription. I also built a 2MB persistent notepad into the portal because I had flash storage doing nothing and that’s just what happens at 2 AM.

This morning I calibrated the battery — ADC raw at full charge came back at 368, updated the constant, now it reads 100%. Right now it’s running a max-load stress test: WiFi on, white LED at full brightness. Real runtime number by end of day.

The Files

Everything is open source at github.com/kaosrmw-eng/GlassLight. Firmware and 3D files both. MIT licensed.

Quick note on the enclosure: the controller/button/switch housing is solid, print that as-is. The frame bracket I’d redesign for your glasses — mine was built around a specific battery I’ll probably never find again. The LED and battery share one enclosure, everything else is in a second housing on the other side of the frame with a wire bridge between them. Functional. Not pretty. Modify it.

If you’ve got the glasses and a parts drawer, you’ve got everything you need.

Day 15. Still figuring out what these things are for. Apparently one answer is: a mounting surface.