61–68 of 68 posts
I think PCB based designs will have a better Design for Mass Manufacturability. See the work of Carl Bugeja. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6sP-joAr8 Either motors, or solenoids, electromechanical brakes, compliant mechanisms.
please consider this reference https://inhabitat.com/ted-moallems-braille-it-labeler-is-mad...
Did that come to anything?
As someone blind, my two pens are that noise, power consumption, and fragility are things that could be compromised to a large degree. If I've had a braille display at school and uni, it would've helped with many of my math issues. If it works and it is cheap, it would be a big step forward for many people. Power is not that expensive compared to the current displays, noise could be mitegated or just powered through,…
Imagine an XY gantry like a 3D printer has. The axis are free, so the device reads the coordinates as the user moves them. It in turn has a little servo motor in there moving the "stylus" in the Z direction. When trying to view an image, white would be mapped to "down" and black would be mapped to "up". This would make it possible to "view" simple 2D plots, or perhaps even equations.
User experience could be improved by using force-feedback motors on the XY gantry, essentially nudging the stylus to stay on the line.
Something like this should be somewhat doable for about $200-300, I reckon.
Making it 3-4x as large would make it fairly trivial to use off-the-shelf servos for each dot. Instead of moving your finger left-to-right across multiple characters, it'd raise & lower the dots while your finger stays on them.
You could even take it to the extreme and create a "reverse steno" display: imagine a regular keyboard home row, with one dot per finger. Use the thumbs for speed control or word skip or something. Maybe it could do double-duty as input method.
Those silicone "popper fidget" toys come to mind as something that are flexible, could be cheaply mass produced, and could hold a given state at the "print" head. It might be possible to embed small metal ball bearings inside that are moved between the outer & inner surface to increase tactility.
The print head just needs enough actuators to change the state of a given column of dots as the tape is rotating past, and a feed motor to move the tape.
Another idea: Instead of actual tactile dots, use a voltage between two appropriately sized/positioned contact points, high enough to be felt by the fingertip, but not so high as to be uncomfortable. Then you just manufacture it as a regular PCB. (It would probably be required to multiplex the voltage between different dots, so that the finger current always flows within the small area of individual dots, rather than…
It might work, and it's an incredibly simple solution, but I'd want to check out if there is any chance of long term nerve damage. The user will be using it many hours a day nearly every day.
i.e. one fatigues the sodium channel properties rather quickly.
There is also the emotional scars of working at a Screaming Monkey Medical Research Center... the burnt hair smell never really washes off. lol ;-)
Only partially joking, we repaired one of the old braille displays which used 400v piezoelectric actuators about 4mm away from peoples fingers.
Best regards, =)
That will reduce the number of moving parts to 1-2 per pixel, while still keeping the actuators complexity rather simple. The ballpoint pen isn't a bad idea, it just requires refinement. With some clever engineering i bet you could make that out of one single plastic part that can act both as a spring and a locking "click"-mechanism.
Similar to the Nist wheel driven display linked in the article [0] but invert it, such that the wheel rolls over a flat grid of miniaturized "ballpoint pens" to set them in the desired state. Rendering a full screen will take 1-2 seconds of rolling the wheel over all the columns. This should be an acceptable compromise.
As someone blind, my two pens are that noise, power consumption, and fragility are things that could be compromised to a large degree. If I've had a braille display at school and uni, it would've helped with many of my math issues. If it works and it is cheap, it would be a big step forward for many people. Power is not that expensive compared to the current displays, noise could be mitegated or just powered through,…
Would it help to have some kind of a reverse plotter? Imagine an XY gantry like a 3D printer has. The axis are free, so the device reads the coordinates as the user moves them. It in turn has a little servo motor in there moving the "stylus" in the Z direction. When trying to view an image, white would be mapped to "down" and black would be mapped to "up". This would make it possible to "view" simple 2D plots, or per…