Seventh grader builds a braille printer with $350 worth of Legos
When Lego revealed its line of EV3 Mindstorms robots last year, Bay Area tech companies came up with some very goofy applications. 12-year-old Santa Clara resident Shubham Banerjee just came up with a decidedly more meaningful one: a braille printer.
Banerjee noticed that braille printers can cost more than $2,000 and wondered if he could drop the price, according to his father, Niloy. A Mindstorms kit is $350 and easily modifiable, giving Banerjee most of the parts he needed to build the printer.
The printer works with regular calculator paper. A robotic arms moves a module that contains a push pin, which pushes down on the paper to create the bumps that form a letter. Right now, one letter can fit on each line on the paper and each one has to be manually inputted. It can print a letter every five to seven seconds.
In the video below, Banerjee prints the word “cat” at the suggestion of his little sister, Anoushka.
“Cool!” she responds, upon feeling the braille.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfnKB1zWOU&w=560&h=315]
Banerjee originally developed the printer for a science fair, but has since expanded his dreams for it. He hopes it can help people in developing nations have easier access to braille printers, which can open up a whole world of expression and interaction. He plans to make the design and Mindstorms program he developed open source for anyone to use, though the printer is still a prototype.