People with visual impairment face various problems in their daily life as the modern assistive devices are often not meeting the consumer requirements in term of price and level of assistance. This paper presents a new design of assistive smart glasses for visually impaired students. The objective is to assist in multiple daily tasks using the advantage of wearable design format. As a proof of concept, this paper only presents one example application, i.e. text recognition technology that can help reading from hardcopy materials. The building cost is kept low by using single board computer raspberry pi 2 as the heart of processing and the raspberry pi 2 camera for image capturing. Experiment results demonstrate that the prototype is working as intended. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.