Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by lemper on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:46AM (#37073201)

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project.

i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it?

of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by dale_glass on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:27AM (#37073482)

They already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by lemper on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:41AM (#37073563)

of course i know. the main point of my previous comment is building one as a side project.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by mkoubaa on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:21AM (#37075267)

Its been on my back burner for a decade. I think we can do a lot better than the ones on the market. I wrote up an idea I had for it (permissive license, I just want the thing to exist)

https://koubaa.github.io/refreshable-braille-display.html

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by Cthulhu_ on Thursday August 10, 2023 @04:24AM (#37073468)

Have you looked at existing braille "displays"? There's a few models out there.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by gostsamo on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:52AM (#37073236)

you need fast refresh speed with pins which are steady under pressure while reading. Also, it should be packed so that you can have 6/8 pins to form a braille cell. the rest is a breeze.

personally, I think that braille is just not worth it for normal reading, but you can't do any stem without it because math is not linear like normal text and tts just sucks.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by bloak on Thursday August 10, 2023 @06:48AM (#37074401)

I met a blind person studying computer science. I asked him why he used a speech synthesiser instead of a Braille display and he replied that he'd love to have a Braille display but they are far too expensive for a mere student.

(The sounds that emerged from his speech synthesiser didn't much resemble human speech but he was used to it and it was obviously quite a lot faster than normal human speech.)

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by gostsamo on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:37AM (#37076009)

The speed is something that one gets used to.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by nyankosensei on Thursday August 10, 2023 @12:40PM (#37078424)

I just learned that several mathematical notations exist for Braille:

https://chezdom.net/mathematicalbraillecodes/

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by JeromeLon on Thursday August 10, 2023 @06:42AM (#37074356)

Braille displays are pretty common, but awfully expensive. If your side project ends up costing less than $1000, you're on a good track. Most of them are in the $2000-$7000 range, with the exception of Orbit Reader 20 which is only $800 (although many online shops seem to be permanently out of stock, I don't know if it's really sold at that price).

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by luplex on Thursday August 10, 2023 @07:06AM (#37074539)

I had a blind classmate back in high school (starting ~2008) who used a laptop and a single-line braille display, and wow I did not know her equipment was that expensive! It just seemed like a reasonably straight-forward piece of hardware to me.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by bluGill on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:12AM (#37075178)

There isn't enough demand to scale it. If everyone in the world would buy a brail display they could make them for cheap, but only a few buy them, and those buyers need to support all the costs of setting up manufacturing.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by whacked_new on Thursday August 10, 2023 @01:07PM (#37078785)

I'm sighted, but bought a used braille display for slightly less than $200 to learn braille for fun. It's pretty impressive to actuate hundreds of tiny dots at a time, for every sentence you need to read. Every once in a while one dot doesn't drop back when the display is refreshed, and since you're swiping your fingers across the display, feeling (or maybe I was seeing?) that one oddly placed dot is disorienting.

Maybe that feeling goes away with fluency, which I can't speak to, but I have a lot of respect for the engineering that goes into these displays. Granted, I'm not a hardware person.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by ms-fellag on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:36AM (#37075410)

I will preface this by saying that i never built anything related to this, nor am i visually-impaired so take whatever i say with a grain of salt. However i have been interested in the subject on & off for quite sometime following some hype around Braille tablets a decade ago. (which sadly never materialized)

> 30 units of display thingy

They are usually called "Braille Cells" (sometimes called "piezoelectric braille cell") and have 8 dots (instead of the usual 6 for books) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Braille_Code] These cells are comprised of 8 levers. The "Dot" rises when a voltage is applied to a crystal that expands due to the piezo effect/bimorph.

Here is a video of someone taking apart a couple of them and showing the insides, driver etc.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwFsTLkpa8 (it's not an in-depth look but just to get an idea)

You can read about how it works in more details here : https://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/9307/InTech-Analysis_and_des...

Okay now what? Well you could acquire some from ebay like this one i guess https://www.ebay.com/itm/255908240759?hash=item3b9551dd77

Or try to find something from Metec, i have seen their P20 as well as the B11 Module used with arduino projects several times, here is the website https://metec-ag.de/en/produkte-braille-module.php

They also sell "Braille Lines" which are combos : cells + backpanel/driver : https://metec-ag.de/en/produkte-braille-zeilen.php (If you find a way to buy them i would greatly appreciate you sharing it)

PS : These cells use 200V DC to work so your project will need a DC-DC converter. You can search for similar speccs to the official one on aliexpress or whatever https://metec-ag.de/downloads/dcdc-converter-5to200v.pdf

Finally you would need a brain for all this which could be the raspi directly or you might opt for using the raspberry-pi (for the ebook manipulation, character-to-dot conversion etc.. unless you decide to pre-format the files) in conjunction with an arduino (for the signal transfer/propagation.. you know sending the dot configuration)

Take a look here for some software inspiration (it also explains the signals the braille module would be expecting but you are better off looking at the Datasheet for anything serious): https://github.com/bertrandmartel/metec-braille-driver#more-...

Good luck.

---- Some more resources :

A nice video from "Applied Science" about a one Cell driver DIY project (He is i believe, using the P16 cell from metec) might help you decide whether to buy a backplane-driver or make your own [also the idea of putting a push-button underneath the braille-cell might be interesting to you for a selection mechanism maybe?] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss-Fux86doQ

A video showing Metic P20 cells + backpanel + DC step-up converter driven by an Arduino Uno (it has no value other than to hopefully encourage you to pursue this project :D ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqth08wQBs

Designing Braille System using P20 Braille Cells Presentation (a student project i think with a good overview of the minimum necessary parts and their functions you can skip to the 5min mark to avoid the usual academia-fluff) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAYB0g6LhVM

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by bramd on Thursday August 10, 2023 @02:54PM (#37080251)

Braille tablets/multiline braille displays are finally coming. The traditional piezo-electric cells are not well suited for them, due to the space the cell + driver+ electronics need. Putting the four rows of pins in a cell does already require staggering the elements. If you disassemble a cell, you'll see that every row has another pin length the bottom row usually has the longest and the top row the shortest pins. So this is not very scalable for multiple lines of dots.

There are two commercially produced techniques for multiline braille displays now: the first comes from Dot (a Korean company) who makes the Dotpad, this technique is also used in the Humanware/APH Monarch which will be an Android based standalone braille tablet. The other technique is created by Orbit Braille and they have their Graphity braille tablet. I couldn't find any good technical documentation that describe how these methods work exactly, so if anyone has any pointers I would like to read more about it.

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by Aerbil313 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @01:25PM (#37079004)

Why do people want braille displays? Sound is a faster, denser, and cheaper information exchange medium and our brains are pattern matching machines. I can easily imagine a screen output -> earphones technology that can provide the use of a screen.

Wait, why confine this to screens? There was a deaf guy in Popular Science years ago who wired the output of a microphone to his visual cortex. He was able to see the sounds, not interfering with his normal vision. Why is there no such product to wire a camera to the brain to enable vision in the blind?

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Re:Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving by contingencies on Thursday August 10, 2023 @05:03PM (#37081764)

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project.

This already fell off the front page but I am actually working on exactly that project right now. The inspiration was standing around with my kid, seeing some braille and decoding it.

The cost of the current systems is associated with the volume of hard tooling and assembly work necessary to create the precision lever assemblies based on 1970s piezo technology.

Therefore, the initial R&D goal is to determine whether it may now be possible to achieve similar outcomes using alternate approaches to the actuation problem. Many people have tried but it seems all have failed to achieve the necessary combination of alternate actuation, spatial density and manufacturability within a low cost design goal.

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