LearnBrailleWith.Tech

Ever wanted to teach someone how to learn braille? Then our braille trainer is for you! Connect to a custom-made device that'll form itself into individual letters to learn braille at a beginner level

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Inspiration

The goal of our project was to build an affordable device that allows for both visually impaired and non-visually impaired people to learn 8-pin braille.

What it does

Currently, the device uses two servos to point to the two vertical halves of each braille segment, as a proof of concept. We also have a website so that users may download a .zip file in order to run the code themselves, and a ReadMe to describe how to use the code. Right now, it's only working if the Arduino is plugged in.

How we built it

We used C# to receive the message that we want to translate to braille, then communicated each character as a byte value over Serial to the Arduino, which translates the byte to angles for the two braille servos.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Since the finger of most people is around 15-20 cm wide, the hardware for braille pins needs to be very small; for example, the pins are around 2mm thick. This unfortunately prevented hardware from being completed, as we did not have a reliable way to get parts this small.
  2. We had to learn nearly every technology in our stack from scratch, from how to build the arduino to the various languages we learnt.
  3. Some hardware ideas simply wouldn't work out due to the complexity needed in such small parts, such as the cylinder used to drive our pins.
  4. We originally wanted to create a website with training exercises and games that would work with our device, however we struggled to find a way to use a USB device in a browser application. Since we did not have time to learn GUI programming to the scale we wanted, we settled with a console program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We created a successful program that takes in words and outputs angles for our braille device, despite the challenge of learning all of our technology overnight.
  2. We created CAD models of what our project could look like in the future.

What we learned

This project has definitely been an important reminder of tempering expectations. An idea like this is extremely difficult to build in 24 hours, especially for a new hacking team. However, we all came out of it with more skills than we entered with; mainly firmware programming, CAD modeling, and product design.

What's next for LearnBrailleWith.Tech

The next step for our project is to finalize and procure a working hardware design, as well as create a more user-friendly interface to use for learning braille. To do so, we'd need to learn more C# for a graphical user-interface that connects reliably with the pre-existing code, and either a 3d printer that can make small enough parts or for us to already have the parts.

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