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12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer
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.'"
So it looks like his device is a braille paper printer (Which is pretty darn cool), but I wonder if something like a smaller version of Legos could be used to make "eraseable" braille type.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
And repraps are stupid because you can just buy a commercial 3d printer.
You are missing the point.
...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.
You are a classic example of the two kinds of people. There are those that do things, and then there are those that ...........
The problem has never been about technology, braille embossers have been around for decades ... it's a problem of volume.
Or, the problem is about affordable technology.
As far as the device being useful, TFA mentions that the device is a prototype. I guess you didn't read TFA, or you don't know what "prototype" means.
I have a Thermaltake 5.25" drive bay cup-holder/cigarette lighter. How is it that there is more of a market demand for THAT than a braille printer? Or all of the other useless tech junk out there? I remember sitting next to a blind pastor on a flight. He was trying to use his laptop, but was having some difficulty because of a program error. We just haven't built these awesome "freedom machines" to be really utilized by anyone with handicaps. All the gaming keyboards, mice, and other gee-wiz devices have more of a market to flood with "mee-to" crap, yet not one real piece of assistance tech in all of MicroCenter or NewEgg? Really?
The real point, and what makes it interesting, is that is was a 12 year-old who built the thing from Lego's and spare junk. He saw a need, and went to fill it. Good on him, that is the point of these science fair projects, make kids think about the world around them and how to solve problems, even simple ones. Hopefully it sets an example as to how we should be thinking about the world; as a place filled with people who have needs and desires. With these types of kits making it into the homes of regular people, I look forward to the engineering boom that could come out of it. I say an arduino, pi, makerbot, and lego mindstorm for every kid. Let their imagination run wild.
A cheap lousy prototype does not improve upon what we've already got.
So...you don't know what "prototype" means. Thanks for clearing that up.
...he's just been set up by a tiger dad or mom. Big fucking deal.
Nope. Tiger moms/dads are the least likely to give their kids an expensive pile of toys, or coddle them in any way at all. Tiger parents are typically hyper-strict disciplinarians who might threaten to burn their children's stuffed animals if their homework isn't perfect, or if they make anything other than A grades.
As for the rest of your post, well...you sound pretty bitter about something related to childhood. Would you like to talk about it?
Cue passive aggressive racist comments. It wouldn't be /. without them.
Did you notice the part about it being built out of LEGO?
Obviously it's not a final production model..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My dad was in military intelligence (the human kind, not the techno kind) and mom a housewife who didn't have a day of schooling. Yet, I caught the programming bug pretty early on (there were triggers which generated that interest of course, but most of it did not come from within my nuclear family). To date I'm the only one who's developed a fully functional Turing-complete programming language in my country. My parents could not help me with that, nor some of the very first programs I wrote as a little boy.
Sometimes we fail to realize that children do pick up interests with very little motivation, which isn't always provided by the parents. No matter how much we may want our child to become a chess grandmaster, he/she might decide to become a professional ballet dancer. What is important is to make sure that their interests are nurtured and celebrated. We as grown-ups should not feel threatened by it, but rather give support so that the child grows in confidence.
As for this particularly 'invention', I have to say that the article is a little too emphatic as well as inaccurate. Had master Banerjee developed his own hardware interface and the codec to control it, then it would be very impressive from a 'new software and hardware' perspective. However, he has only written software that (most probably) interfaces with the Mindstorms software drivers. I bet you anything that there are plenty of children out there who've developed lots of clever software for Mindstorms, and created clever mechanical devices from the EV3 kit. Why should they not be celebrated as much as master Banerjee?
Tiger moms/dads are *most* likely to bribe your professor or require contractors to hire you b/c it would be bad "face" if their kid was a failure at life.
Take that 'tiger' superiority and cram it up your...
whatever...
GP's post is acrimonious but it is **totally fucking true**
This kid didn't do this...the kid's parent gave him step by step directions. I had an awesome dad who was a cryptographer in the Navy in the 70s and he taught me **all kinds** of awesome shit. That's awesome and I'm thankful. He sure as shit didn't help me write an Orthogonal Time-Division Multiplexing algorythm for my science fair projects though...because that would have been **cheating**...he helped me make a few things but obviously this kid had all kinds of help and most importantly, the article seems to purposely not mention how the kid made all this happen just his step by step.
It's about accuracy in reporting **WHAT IT TAKES TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE TECH WORLD**
if we present this mindless crap as examples of young people doing science...well, we're cheating **them** and **ourselves**
there are **real** kids out there doing stuff at this level with only basic guidance & procurement help
Thank you Dave Raggett
As a Rube-Goldberg device, I'd like to see a Lego printer that assembled "Braille movable type" using "Letters" made of 2x3 legos with selected dots shaved off.
Call it the Legotenburg Press.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's a great thing he did, and I hope he can make it something usable for the blind also. There exists screen reader type of braille machines like ones from Seika, which I've installed for one natively blind person. These can go for thousands of dollars because the mass market doesn't exist. The person I know also utilizes OCR scanners and speech synthesis. The books and newspapers are provided in audio by an organization for the blind.
I'd guess there isn't much need for paper as the medium, but everything helps. Cheap method to produce printed braille would be of great help for event organizers who need to cater blind participants.