[39] - Instant Braille

Inspiration

According to a World Health Organization’s report, the total number of blind people in the world is estimated at 39 million. These people usually have restrictions regarding their daily lives, whether it is buying groceries or driving: there are lots of activities they are still not capable of doing, specially education, since it mainly involves reading and writing. Not a lot of resources are in braille and not everyone knows how to read braille, that is how the idea of Instant Braille was born.

What it does

This idea is composed by hardware and software: the hardware is designed to "print" out the letters in braille that the software sends to it; these letters come from a picture that the camera sends to our API translates to text using Machine Learning.

How I built it

The software was built using a raspberry pi 3, a camera for the raspberry, python, vision API from Google Cloud. The "translating device" was built with servo motors and a breadboard

Challenges I ran into

The main issue was found within the hardware since some of the original tools we had thought of were quite hard to find, also, the ideas sometimes could not work due to the raspberry pi's limitations (i.e. voltage). In software, we had a hard time configuring the raspberry pi and then, while defining the algorithms that would be printed.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The fact that we, as a team, could all try to find a solution for the hardware issue (which came out rather amazing and functions well). Also, that sometimes we had to do some emergency research and we were able to apply new knowledge fine

What I learned

That these kind of of projects are better done when you take advantage of already exiting APIs, also, that no matter how hard it is to build some devices, we can still find a way to construct it in a simple way that works just as the complex ideas

What's next for [39] - Instant Braille

To develop a tinier device that allows people to carry it around