caydenpiercehax

MentraOS allows multiple apps to run at the same time and access context at the same time by running apps in the cloud.

This is enabled by relay servers. You can use Mentra's relay server, or host your own.

This is the architecture that we use and recommend so multiple apps can run at once and access powerful AI, while saving your phones battery. If you need to run offline or on the edge, we're working on the Mentra Edge SDK so you can skip the cloud, but it has downsides - only 1 app at a time.

Remember, every app on your phone is communicating with its own backend - which you have to trust. This isn't different.

Users aren't forced to use the store. You can self host a relay server, self host a store, etc.

Translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions - use them today!

Ad blocking - we'll need a research team and 5 years https://xkcd.com/1425/

You're right, it doesn't. Because the glasses that you can actually wear today are not MR/AR.

But as the tech progresses, so will MentraOS to support spatial experiences.

Fwiw we've been building open source smart glasses tech for 7 years, without a dime of funding until ~9 months ago, you can see it all on GitHub. We actually want this next platform to be open, that's our mission.

That sounds nice but there's problems in reality.

How do the glasses serve as a "dumb camera to your phone"? What protocol do they use to do this? It doesn't exist. It's something that must be solved at the OS layer.

What if you want to use multiple apps? Are you going to spend 2 minutes each time disconnecting Bluetooth from one phone app, connecting to another, and then using it? No, you need to runtime that lets multiple apps access the sensors as needed.

Do you want to make an app that accesses the microphone? If you want to have translation app running at the same time that you're taking notes, then again you need some way to allow multiple apps to run at once.

MentraOS solves those problems.

Most people pursuing this include display + microphone.

The microphone lets you pick up voice, which is critical. Captions, translation, note-taking, etc. all benefit from this.

Even Realities G1 is this. Mentra is releasing a pair in first half of 2026 like this. Display + microphone.

I lived in the woods during my undergrad too: https://medium.com/@caydenpierce4/the-homeless-hippie-cyborg...

This was in between two stints living and working in a mobile RV hacker lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT1gPmQQkxI

I'm in SF now and we'd probably be best friends.

The 3 seconds of latency is writing a bitmap image from the phone to the smart glasses over BLE. It's very fast to send text, but slow to send bitmaps.

For text, everything is fast - the AugmentOS servers introduce <350ms round trip latency in most places/countries.

In next-generation glasses, this will be a lot faster because of better bitmaps handling, BMP encoding schemes, and also pre-loading of BMPs.

Mentra Live is indeed a camera + speakers + microphone pair of lightweight smart glasses - that you can build for.

Mentra Live runs AugmentOS, so you can control all the I/O (camera, speakers, mic) in your own app with the AugmentOS SDK.

Regarding use the backend service all the time: Most apps/developers connect through official AugmentOS.org servers and focus on building their apps, but you can self-host your own backend if you want.

100% agree.

I've been building smart glasses for over 7 years. First 6 years were in academia because the tech wasn't ready yet, because they were too heavy and battery didn't last long enough.

But in the last year, all-day battery smart glasses have become lightweight enough to be worn all day (see Even Realities G1, Vuzix Z100, etc.).

I believe smart glasses are having their iPhone moment in 2025 + 2026.

We make the smart glasses OS that Kevin used in the video to make this smart glasses app: AugmentOS.org

We've been building smart glasses tech for a long time. 6 years ago, we realized it was super hard to make apps for smart glasses due to lack of software ecosystem.

Since then, we've seen lightweight, all day glasses hardware arrive. We've seen incredible AI arrive.

But our problem from day 1 is still here. It's hard to build apps.

We took what we learned from 6 years of open source smart glasses development to build AugmentOS - an operating system for smart glasses.

AugmentOS brings a suite of apps to users' smart glasses, and provides an SDK to enable developers to build apps for smart glasses.

We're a team trying to learn languages faster. We bring proven language learning tools into real world second language conversations.

These smart glasses give you live rare word translation, second language captions, contextual word suggestions... and some new things we're cooking.

Proactive AI is the killer app for Smart Glasses. Could smart glasses make us more intelligent and creative while improving our memory in conversations? Yep, that's exactly what we've built - and it's called Convoscope.

Convoscope listens to your conversations, proactively answering questions before you ask and suggesting relevant info during meetings and conversations. It's like a super-intelligence on your shoulder helping you lead your meetings, ace interviews, learn at super speeds, crush your business pitch, and more.

This is only possible because of recent advancements in light-weight, fashion forward smart glasses that are physically, socially, and visually comfortable enough to be worn all day, every day. Thanks to our partner Vuzix Corporation for providing us with Vuzix Ultralite OEM Reference Platform - the world's best all-day wearable smart glasses.

Convoscope is built by TeamOpenSmartGlasses - we're building open-source smart glasses tech to upgrade human thinking. Our community includes a team of open-source engineers alongside leading smart glasses hardware companies.

Let us know what you think! The code is open source and we'd love help to build out the killer app for smart glasses!

It's a 2 layer PCB. I put all the components on one side for simpler PCBA.

The other side of the board is pretty boring - just a ground plane and a couple traces. Like others said, this whole thing could be done on a single layer if you wanted.

Yeah totally agree, circuit generators are powerful. There's a lot of cases where you decide your higher level constraints (e.g. I want a filter of this architecture) and the rest is plug and play with equations, which can (SHOULD) be automated.

I've enjoyed the jump to "code-first" PCB design but can understand your point - any thoughts on a UI that would allow these programmatic constructs interleaved with more classical EDA workflow?

Thanks for the feedback. There's definitely a lot more that goes into a serious design. I purposefully chose a simpler design to experiment with automating the easy but repetitive stuff.

To address a few points and how software-defined electronics actually does make sense for it:

> critical placement You can use a `place` command to exactly place things wherever you want.

> mechanical Use board outline functions, `place` commands, arbitrary shapes, 3D component shapes, etc. to meet these needs. You can export a STP and send to your mech team for validation.

> supply-chain Parametric search query function allow designers to specify only as much information as they need about a component (e.g. 0402 10k, but not MPN) and the system can pick the best component at compile time that is in stock with necessary quantity available.

Great idea. Yeah, that could be done.

First pass would be to bundle the LEDs based on their type - just change the ordering from an ordering based on physical position to an ordering based on the logical meaning of each connection.

In the second pass, you could have a separate LED bank with LEDs marked USB3, USB2, etc. Hook those up to a couple of logic gates so that the LED turns on when it detects the USB3, USB2, etc. configuration.

When I started designing PCBs a few years ago (after some years of electronics prototyping and software engineering) I was somewhat shocked by the manual, repetitive tasks I kept doing.

So, I tried to automate as many of these small tasks as possible in the simplest design I could think of - a USB cable tester PCB.

Please share your thoughts, ideas, criticism - I'm looking forward to hearing any feedback from the HN community!