12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer for 20% the Cost

[Rhykker]

12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer for 20% the Cost


A 12-year-old has built a braille printer out of a repurposed $350 Lego kit. Commercial braille printers typically cost over $2,000.

We've all played with Lego blocks at some point in our lives, but few of us have accomplished anything close to the feat of engineering that 12-year-old Shubham Banerjee has. The seventh-grade Santa Clara, California resident used a $350 Lego Mindstorms kit to build a fully-functional braille printer.

The total cost was actually a few dollars over $350 - Banerjee used about $5 worth of supplies from Home Depot to complete his project - but that is still a far cry from normal braille printers, which can cost more than $2,000. Initially created for a science fair, the Braigo printer, as Banerjee calls it, can presently print one letter every five to seven seconds.

The young inventor hopes that his creation can one day be used to grant people in developing nations easier access to braille printers. As he continues to iterate on his project, Banerjee plans to make both his design and software open source and available to the public free of charge.

The current design makes use of the easily modifiable Mindstorms kit to have a robotic arm move a module that contains a push pin. The pin pushes down on the paper to create the characteristic braille bumps, and one letter can fit on each line of the paper.

Source: Gigaom [http://gigaom.com/2014/02/17/seventh-grader-builds-a-braille-printer-with-350-worth-of-legos/]

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[josemlopes]

To be honest I doubt that the $2,000 printer takes the same amount of time "typing" a single letter (not counting the time the person takes choosing the letter since thats just software).


Still very cool thing coming out of a 12 year old

 

[AntiChri5]

To be honest I doubt that the $2,000 printer takes the same amount of time "typing" a single letter (not counting the time the person takes choosing the letter since thats just software).


Still very cool thing coming out of a 12 year old

And there are probably durability issues too.

But, yeah, pretty damn cool all the same.

 

[Khymerion]

It actually opens the door open for someone to look at this as a prototype and then to build a more durable machine using the same style and concept. Just to show that it can be done without having to resort to bigger, more expensive alternatives.

 

[Skeleon]

Good thing.
Imagine if he expands upon it with a better interface or multiple channels or similar. Medical devices are incredibly expensive, even when they are relatively simple things. Something as basic as this could really help.
Couldn't see any of the dots on the video, unfortunately...

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well if people need cheap printers just get some old ones, the new ones are so extortionately expensive because they are high grade industrial printers with speech synthesis and all sorts of nonsense... that doesn't come cheap.

But anyway the kid made a very cool project and hopefully he makes many more.
And on the final note... holy fucking shit Lego, I'm not sure why but you seem hell bent on being the only mother fuckers crazier in their pricing then Games Workshop.

 

[1337mokro]

And here we see something known as price fixing.

Truffles for example don't HAVE to be so expensive, but the farmers simply refuse to use methods of farming truffles we have known for centuries because those would increase the yield and an increased yield would mean a reduced price. So cheap in fact that peasants in the olden days would eat truffle soup, same with oysters.

The printer costs 2000$ because a CEO somewhere has to make a living of giving the blind the ability to read. That expensive car ain't going to pay for itself.