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12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-type dept.

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.'"

1 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I have a blind friend. He can't see anything- he was born blind and his eyes look kinda funny for it.

    He uses a commercial printer that set him back several thousand dollars, plus a unit that lets him "feel" text (without actually printing it- it's basically a long line of pins that extend or retract to create the equivalent of a Braille character display).

    Anyways, there isn't much going on in the way of hardware here. The printer runs over serial (DB9) and the displays a USB unit, but it emulates a RS-232 serial port on the host OS. I was able to get a bunch of ancient text based adventure games working specifically for thae devices not too long ago (took about a day to Hal up the code and get it compiled and talking to the hardware).

    My point is this- software matters, and this kid has NONE. Building a Braille printer is not a hard thing to do. Writing software for a Braille printer and display that actually makes those devices useful to the point that a blind person can navigate a modern day computer is.

    Frankly, I built dot printers using the original Lego Mindstorms kit (the one with the H8 powered yellow brick). It wouldn't have been a strech to do Braille printing instead. So I fail to see why this is even news, as if its somehow revolutionary or even worth being mentioned. Hell, Lego even published a pneumatic kit for the Mindstorms that let you build a plotter.