Affordable Refreshable Braille Display for Reading and Learning

Project Description

Reading books Reading books is still a luxury for visually impaired people. High printing cost of braille books and astronomically high priced e-book readers are the reasons behind this. Moreover, braille is quite a complex system. This makes it difficult for the beginners to learn braille. Our prototype converts e books to braille and facilitates self learning of braille alphabets to new learners. It displays the characters on a mechanical display unit in real time. It has been possible to make the model very cost efficient by using an innovative alternative to available linear actuators. A text-to-speech system has been incorporated for teaching braille to kids without the help of a trainer. Take a look at the poster for our project here.

My Roles

I was in charge of Fabrication, Electrical Systems, and Programming. I used a transistor circuit for switching each relays individually. The relays were controlled by the Raspberry Pi. I also programmed the device using python. My program included reading files from the USB, reading the characters one by one, and sending the instructions to the Raspberry Pi, which controlled the mechanical display. I incorporated the text-to-speech in the python program to facilitate learning.