I will soon order a bunch of electronic stuff to get started on arduino and I have two projects in mind. One is absolutely insane and might take more than a year and the "easy" one is the one I will be talking about now.
I want to make a helmet for a cosplay which incorporates an ultrasonic distance sensor, a regular and a infrared camera.
Nothing fancy here, I guess making a code to use either a cam or the other and putting a distance reading somewhere would be pretty easy.
My problem is the display, I originaly wanted to use a viewfinder for each eye but they are quite hard to find and also expensive. So I thought about using mini displays and a lens but this might be way too difficult. I also thought using a HUD, it could be fairly easy to "project" what the infrared cam sees to get a mixed view but I don't want to have a tank on my head. I searched to transparent displays but they are also hard to find, in fact the only one I found is not made anymore and it would be hard to focus on a screen a few centimeters away from the eye and stuff that is meters away.
So I need your advices, the absolute best would be viewfinder so if you have links to buy some for cheap im taking and if you think another option could be used well I would be very happy to hear about it. By the way I browsed the internets for a few hours before asking here.
Also if there is a place to introduce myself and I missed it, just tell me.
I dont know all the ins-n-outs of your project, and what you want to all do...
but I am not sure an Arduino is what you will need. Not a lot of processing power/memory..etc.. (nor am I really clear on what part the Arduino is to play in all of this?)
I actually attempted to tackle a similar project (real-time HUD for a Iron Man helmet)..a few years back.
For myself.. and my skill set at the time..
I first mocked my approach up on my PC.
I used Adobe Flash as my base.
It takes the environments webcam and uses it for a 'real-time' display of whatever the webcam sees.
Doing this in flash also allowed me to over-lay any data/graphics/effects over the webcam feed.
This all worked fine as a POC (proof of concept) until it was actually time to port things to the 'Arduino'...
An Arduino just wouldnt suffice here.. I needed something more like a RasberryPi, or a pcDuino.
(but both of these I have zero experience with).. for my project is was crucial that the 'board' I was planning on using support the Flash Player plugin... but I could never get a solid answer from the pcDuino forums (so the project died)
You may want to checkout Adafruit storefront.. and see if they have any HD/display screens (like they use in various arcade/mame projects)
The optics is the tough part for a proper HUD. You need to have the focus distance for the screen to be 5ft to infinity. Bouncing it off an angled reflector which is also transparent is not hard to conceptualize but the optical parts are not available as easily as buying a transistor.
A camera viewfinder is one possibility. If you can set up your data as a video overlay and there's a camera in the helmet providing your forward view, it's all possible. You can buy the viewfinder optics quite easily for just a few bucks on eBay and then use any small TFT screen as your video display.
But if this is just cosplay, then others need to see that your helmet is doing something. You don't actually need to read the data from inside the helmet do you? A small projector shining the numbers onto your face is going to look like the movies. (How do you think Hollywood does it?)
The actor wears a helmet that has a small projector attached. The latest Iron Man films then overlay a simulated hologram but the light on the actor's face is attached to the actor.
MorganS:
A small projector shining the numbers onto your face is going to look like the movies.
Of course such a device has absolutely no use to its user. Don't go down the path of the darkside.
From what I've read on the subject, a HUD type display can be done with some sort of transparent sheet to reflect the image of an OLED in a way which superimposes the image over the actual scene. I believe the OLED display is often above the user's head.
Even if you were to get this to work well, I don't think the effect would be visible to people outside the helmet (i.e. you'd be the only one to see it). Such a helmet would likely be very bulky.
It's for a cosplay but walking around with a helmet with only some sensors sticking out will still have some effect and it could be used to other stuff too.
And by searching for a viewfinder on Ebay or such stuff I only find stuff to adapt on cameras or tiny but expensive external viewfinder to attach on the shoe mount.