Legitur Digitos

Inspiration: We were inspired by a quora post while searching for unique projects that involved working with Arduino and adding value to healthcare. We analyzed the fact that although most visually-impaired people can use the text to audio applications to interpret text, there are a number of individuals who are medically "deafblind. "

What it does: When the PDF is uploaded in the web application, Legitur Digitos Braille, triggers a request which converts the PDF text into string characters that are mapped to the corresponding braille alphabetical representation (to get an accurate reading). This is represented by the LEDs that light up.

How we built it: We first worked on building the web application, where the PDF is uploaded using Angular.js. Then we made a representation of the "braille system of raised dots" using LED lights. Finally, we built the server in Python flask which connected the Arduino C code to Angular.

Challenges we ran into: The first challenge we ran into was building the braille system of raised dots. This is a set of 6 dots where an alphabet is represented when at least one of the dots is raised. We could not find a component that absolutely mimicked this functionality, and as a result, we had to improvise. We brainstormed and thought of different ways to achieve this, and finally decided to use LED lights for the prototype presentation. This seemed contradictory since we were building a product for visually-impaired people, and they could not see the LED lights, but we thought it best for the presentation.

The next challenge we ran into was connecting our Arduino code (C code) to the angular.js. At first, we thought of using binding.gyp to compile the C code into a .node file, which could reference in our JavaScript code as a Javascript module. However, this proved more difficult than we thought, and we had to move over to connecting the Arduino code to the angular.js through python flask. After calling the String characters through python, we discovered that the braille representation

Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are proud of successfully representing the braille symbols with the LEDs. We celebrate the connection of our Arduino code with python to be able to receive strings and convert the characters into the braille system.

What we learned: We learned that we could actually do our Arduino code all in python. We had no idea about this and could have avoided the hassle of trying to connect python to C (which took a large chunk of our time) by doing our Arduino code solely in python.

What's next for Legitur Digitos: We are going to improve the Legitur Digitos by replacing the LEDs with the "braille-like" raises or buttons that will go high or low according to the braille system for the user to touch or feel. We will connect the Angular to the python backend more fluidly so as to obtain the text from the uploaded pdf file and convert it into a string and then raise the corresponding buttons/points to the string characters. Then we will work on the housing of the Legitur Digitos so that it is all enclosed in a portable pad. After this, we will work with our Department of Disabilities and Accessibility at Berea College to gain more exposure for the project

Built With

• angular.js
• arduino
• bootstrap
• c
• firebase
• flask
• html5
• python