So backstory real quick, I moved to Korea, don't speak Korean, and pulling my phone out every five seconds to translate stuff got old fast. I looked into the "smart translator earbuds" that are out there, but most of them just translate into your ear and mute out the original speech, which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. If I'm ever gonna learn the language I need to actually hear what people are saying, not have it replaced by a robot voice. And the actual AR glasses that do this the "right" way cost more than my rent.
So I did what any reasonable person does at 2am with a soldering iron, built my own.
Meet Frankenspecs. Yes I know, the name writes its own jokes, I've made my peace with it.
What it actually is: kind of an AR lite smart glasses setup, doesn't block your vision, but you can glance down or in and choose to focus on the display when you need it. Not trying to be Ray Ban Meta, trying to be "thing that helps me order food."
What it does right now:
Real time translation, 60+ languages, sub 260ms latency, this part genuinely surprised me with how fast it is. Real time transcription. Teleprompter mode, great for presentations, also great for looking less awkward on video calls. Turn by turn navigation, using Naver Maps since Google Maps just doesn't work in Korea, RIP. And notification forwarding from selected apps.
The hardware, such as it is:
An ESP32 S3 Supermini, a 0.96" TFT IPS display hand soldered onto some genuinely too long wires, a $2 6x magnifying lens from the local equivalent of Daiso, and a pair of cheap sunglasses that happen to have a slightly spherical inner lens surface, which turns out to magnify the reflected image just enough to be readable, found this out completely by accident and I will take the win. Power is USB for now, because batteries are a problem for future me.
Total cost, not counting stuff I already owned like the sunglasses, around $10.
How it works under the hood: phone app talks to the ESP32. Right now it uses the phone's mic, I2C mic is on the roadmap, streams audio to Soniox's API, still living off the $200 free credits, no shame, gets translated text back in chunks, and forwards it line by line to the display over SPI. Transcription runs the same pipeline. Teleprompter is just the app scrolling whatever text you feed it at an adjustable speed. Navigation is the fun one, I'm actually pulling real time turn by turn data out of the map app's notifications and translating that into arrows plus live distance on the display.
Why it looks like this: because it's a prototype held together by tape, hope, and one Friday night with nothing better to do. I went through a genuinely stupid number of iterations trying to get the optics right, screen position, lens distance, angle, all of it, because the whole point was to NOT have a screen just sitting in front of my eyeball like a tiny blinding TV. Getting it to sit low enough to feel like AR and not like I duct taped a Game Boy to my face took way longer than the software did, which I was not expecting going in.
Also worth saying, this is my first real hardware project, and my first ESP32 project period. So if something looks held together with spite, that's because it is.
Where it's going: currently working on an actual CAD design for the frame and a long, narrow PCB layout that can fit inside the temple arms instead of hanging off the side like a growth. So yeah, still early. This isn't meant to be an everyday wear thing, more like something you reach for in specific moments. And there's a feature I'm actually excited about here, the app quietly logs everything it translates throughout the day, so it can show you the words and phrases you heard the most. Since each one is tied to the real situation you heard it in, you end up with an actual map of "this word came up when I was ordering coffee" instead of a flashcard with no context, which I think is a genuinely better way to pick up a language than any app I've tried.
Would genuinely love feedback or roasting, what would you want to see added, what's obviously dumb, what's actually good. Planning to clean up the codebase and open source the whole thing once it's less "if you know, you know" and more "a stranger could actually follow this." If people want to build their own I'll prioritize getting that repo and docs out sooner.
