Friday, July 28, 2006

No Electronics $10 Braille Writer

Filed under: etc.

Four mechanical engineering undergrads at Johns Hopkins have designed a novel, inexpensive and portable Braille writing device that has no electronic components:

For a class called Engineering Design Project, four mechanical engineering majors were asked to produce such an instrument that would cost less than $50 each. The more sophisticated and generally more cumbersome typewriter-style or computer-based Braille writers available to blind people typically cost much more.

At the end of a two-semester research, design and testing process, the student inventors came in well below the target price. They estimated that their Braille writer, if mass-produced, would cost about $10 each in an easy-to-assemble kit. The team members recently presented their prototype to the project's sponsor, the Baltimore- based National Federation of the Blind...

To keep assembly and maintenance costs low, the hand- held writer invented by the Johns Hopkins students operates in a purely mechanical fashion. It features six buttons that can be depressed to produce any of the embossed patterns that correspond to a Braille letter, number or punctuation mark. The device is used with a traditional Braille slate that features rows of rectangular openings or "cells." When a piece of paper is inserted into the slate, the device can insert one Braille letter or number into each cell. Normally, a blind person uses a stylus to poke up to six indentations into each cell, forming one bump at a time. The students' device uses metal pins to emboss up to six marks at once, which could speed up the writing process. Because the buttons are close together, a single finger can depress more than one.

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