Recon Jet smart glasses converted into a Linux voice AI assistant
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A developer used Claude Code to convert a Recon Jet smart glasses unit pre-ordered in 2013 into a Linux camera and voice AI assistant. After a battery replacement, the device was cracked, first running rooted Android, then switched to mainline Linux 6.18, booting from the eMMC boot partition to lighting up the screen in under four seconds. The glasses have no cellular network, so when out and about they need a phone hotspot and a VPN connection to services. To control the cost of continuous camera processing, all AI requests go to a llama-swap server in the developer's home homelab; the wake word uses a microWakeWord model trained on a Mac, running locally on the device and using less than 2% of one core. The developer says the device draws over 300mA continuously, with about 1 hour of battery life.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 23 min ago
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- Hacker News AIHacked 2013 Recon Jet sports glasses into a Linux camera/voice AI assistant
A developer revived a barely-used 2013 Recon Jet (TI OMAP4430, 1 GiB RAM, 8 GB eMMC, 428x240 Kopin microdisplay) by replacing its dead battery, then used Claude Code to root it, port mainline Linux 6.18 with drivers for display, touchpad, camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, IMU and more, and build a voice-driven AI assistant. The assistant runs an on-device agent harness while vision, speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis call remote APIs on a homelab llama-swap server, with a "Heya, Jet!" wake word and a cranky-NPC persona using a cloned voice. The author notes the AI's world model lacked spatial coherence and that Claude excelled at low-level reverse engineering but failed at architectural hygiene.
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