BRAIGO: BRAILLE PRINTER WITH LEGO

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12 year old develops low cost Braille Printer with Lego and promises to give design and code for free download


Developed by Shubham Banerjee, a 7th grade student from Santa Clara, California. BRAIGO is a Braille Printer using Lego Mindstorms EV3. This concept slashes the price of a printer from more than $2000 to around $350 for education, teaching and home use purposes. Thus giving a more cost effective printer for the disadvantaged.

12 year old develops low cost Braille Printer with Lego and promises to give design and code for free download


LEGO Systems, Inc. hosted the 'Build for Good' competition where Seattle's most innovative companies, including Amazon, Egencia, Expedia, HTC, Nordstrom, Xbox and zulily, were invited to compete by building a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robot designed to improve everyday life on April 10. Shubham Banerjee, 12 year old inventor of BRAIGO, a Braille printer that anyone can build using a LEGO MINDSTORMS set, inspired the challenge and was among the judges who awarded Nordstrom with top honors for creating a robot that made it easier to dispense medication. A standing room only crowd at the EMP Museum cheered on teams from Seattle's marquee corporations who showcased robots that did everything from housesitting to planting crops for the chance to win five LEGO MINDSTORMS kits to be donated to a local children's charity of their choice.

"I've been building for fun my whole life. When I learned how many people can't afford to buy a braille printer, I realized that I could probably build a solution using MINDSTORMS, "said Shubham Banerjee. "It was really cool seeing all of these robots in action today and having the opportunity to judge the competition gave me even more ideas of what I could build next!" 

This project uses the Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit costing $349 and some add-ons from Home-depot costing another $5 to prove that its feasible to make a brail printer for education purposes and schools that's much cheaper. The project uses the base reference model known as Banner Print3r thats included with the EV3 set (credit: Ralph Hempel) and was redesigned with totally new software to print letters A-Z. The project is named as BRAIGO v1.0 in short for Brail with LEGO. There are endless possibilities to add enhancements in software to make BRAIGO do a lot more. 

Shubham made and broke 7 models , before settling with one base model and started to make mechanical enhancements and coding from scratch (after analyzing the code that came with the model) - This was like almost 5 days before he had a deadline to submit for his school's science fair project.

The student wishes to make this project open source (already started to upload the concepts) with the design and software readily available for public consumption free of charge. Thus giving a new tool in the hands of blind institutions or even parents with visually impaired children to use this printer at a 80% savings from commercially available products out there in the market.

Sources:

www.braigolabs.com

http://sociotechnocrat.kinja.com/12-year-old-develops-low-cost-braille-printer-with-lego-1515215252

http://sociotechnocrat.kinja.com/braigo-inspired-seattle-based-companies-battle-it-out-a-1562379189

http://sociotechnocrat.kinja.com/braigo-braille-printer-with-lego-how-to-build-inst-1546125354?rev=1395116648

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braigo#mediaviewer/File:Braigo_-_Braille_Printer.JPG

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