Custom magnetic sunglasses attachment

 

    I can't wear my sunglasses without contacts, because eyesight=bad. I also don't want to pay for prescription sunglasses. To fix this, I decided to try and turn my sunglasses into a slim shade that I can easily snap onto my current glasses. 

    To start, I had to see if my sunglasses would even fit. Eyeballing it, I can roughly see the size of the lenses are the same, so I assumed I could safely overlay them and have my creation work.

    My plan was to create a two part adapter system:

1. A permanent adapter on my sunglasses that would magnetically couple to
2. A non-permanent adapter on my glasses that I could slip on, and would act as anchors for (1).

    To do this, I need to cut away everything from my sunglasses so it can really sit flat against my glasses. After taking a dremel to my sunglasses, I knew it was past the point of no return. 

    While CADing my adapters, I imported a photo of my glasses and sunglasses to help me make adapters that fit the weird contours of my glasses. I experimented with different magnet interfaces, including discrete axial neodymium magnets and Halbach array extruded flat magnet, and ultimately settled on discrete axially polarized neodymium ones solely because I could make them sit proud of their recesses and get a satisfying clicky noise when they snapped together.

    I also got to rapidly prototype a lot of different iterations thanks to the size of these parts, the fleet of Form3 printers, and the machine shop that I have access to as an engineer at work.

    The final product was adapters printed in our Tough2000 resin, with matching magnets glued into adapters using some cyanoacrylate. The sunglass-side of the adapters was also permanently glued onto my sunglasses. 

    Now, whenever I want to put on my sunglasses, I can just slip them out of a slim pouch, take off the removable glasses-side adapters, slip them on, and snap on my sunglasses.