Braille 2.0

thingiverse

A blind man, named Dave, contacted me about trying out the braille I printed on a makerbot earlier this year. Before shipping it off, I made slight improvements to the design. Within days, Dave received his test pieces and was extremely pleased with the quality of the braille they produced. He said that he could feel the dots correctly sized, smooth and comfortable to read. Currently, I am researching traditional methods of creating braille and discussing with Dave about the possibility of using the makerbot for this purpose. To ensure good output, it is crucial to prevent the seam from appearing on the front face of the braille strip. While I attempted to fix this issue in Skeinforge, I found a more reliable solution by adding a ridge at the back to displace the seam. Inventor was used for creating the pieces, but other programs can work just as well. A test piece made in Sketchup also proved successful. Similar to my previous design, I extruded the braille font from a flat face (80x10x2mm), providing a .dxf file with all dimensions used. The size and spacing of the dots are vital for readability, so referencing standard dimensions from http://dots.physics.orst.edu/gs_layout.html is advised.