12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer 49
An anonymous reader writes "Shubham Banerjee, a seventh grader in California, has developed a braille printer made from a $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and some simple hardware. He calls the science fair project the Braigo. 'The Braigo's controller is set up to scroll through the alphabet. You choose a letter and it prints it out with tactile bumps on a roll of calculator paper. The print head is actually a thumbtack, which Banerjee settled on after also testing a small drill bit and a mechanical pencil. The first prototype isn't terribly fast, but it proves the concept works. Banerjee is working on improvements that will allow it to print full pages of text.'"
Not particularly useful.. (Score:0, Informative)
Yes it produces Braille... but 0.25 cps on 2 inch wide paper with the wrong dot spacing is not particularly useful. A printer that costs one tenth with one twentieth the performance is no breakthrough. ... it's a problem of volume. Unless dual use technology (assistive and mainstream) for either embossers or refreshable displays are used the cost will always be very high.
The problem has never been about technology, braille embossers have been around for decades
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
...software matters, and this kid has NONE
Read the fucking article dipshit:
"He took a basic, preexisting pattern for a printer and reworked it with new software and hardware enhancements to print out letters in braille"
Anyways, my point is this: frankly, the twelve year old kid is far better than you, you pathetic little pimpstick.
Re:Braille Legos (Score:4, Informative)
There are other printers that can produce "erasable" braille. Some of the most interesting do it with tiny electrical impulses that produce a tactile sensation that is an illusion of dots. This was described in an article [economist.com] in last week's Economist. The article pointed out that far fewer people are learning braille today for two reasons: other technologies replace it for many purposes, and, because of better treatment and prevention, there are far fewer blind people today.