I plan on making a low cost braille embosser. My machine will come with a simple GUI that will allow the user to translate any given text in Braille and emboss it on a continous feed roll of paper.
Unsurprisingly I'm not the first one to attemp such an endeavour, the most prominent example being the Braigo Labs experience.
Googling around it is possible to find lots of previous tries on this same topic, even if on a smaller scale (they usually focus on the end effector).
These are some examples:
All the material are easily purchased locally or already in the fabinventory, bar the solenoid; making my own is for sure a viable idea, but I found that making an impromptu solenoid that can move a nail is one thing, but making a solenoid strong enough to serve my purpose is something else. Here follows a comprehensive bill of materials:
I plan to use several processes to finish my project:
Future plans involve the implementation of extended 8-points Braille among the GUI options, designing a 6 solenoids version of the machine in order to greatly speed up the embossing times, rewriting the whole microcontroller code in pure C in order to definitely ditch the Arduino environment, switch from an ATmega micro to an Xmega microcontroller in order to take advantage of the USB connectivity, thus removing the serial cable (the end goal is to make the machine completely plug-and-play, as easy to use as possible for the end user).
With the project in its current form two main questions arises: how stable is the translation software and how reliable the paper feeding system is.
Concerning the first point Liblouis is a time tested braille translator, with an active community of developers; all the problems lie in my implementation of it, mainly on how it behaves with very long text (will it gobble all the available memory, bringing down the whole system? For the time being the longest text I tried to translate was the first 6 cantos of "The Divine Comedy").
The paper feeding system, while functional, can be vastly improved, decreasing the paper waste.
Ideally a full working system should be able to print any kind of text, of any length, without issues.
That being said, considering the aforementioned uncertainties that still lingers over my project I will consider myself satisfied with my machine printing a couple of lines of Braille text keeping the characters alignment and don't falling apart in the process. That would be a good starting point to start implementing all the features that would help my project evolve from a proof-of-concept, insiders-only fabbable machine to a real appliace that could find its place in small officies and households.