Turnaround

                      After it seemed very bleak that we would have a finished final product , we suddenly have a fresh wave of enthusiasm and after some thinking and some help from Mr.Srinivas , we have now a new design for each pin making it easy to miniaturize the whole thing....well not easy but easier than before, well see how it goes.

Check the picture below for the updated pin design

 

That is all for now....i am very hopeful that i will post a fully working braille cell the next time.

Problems...................... Solutions

            Well making a miniature braille cell with SMA is harder that we expected...we are trying to get it made elsewhere....other than that there is this company called Alpha Aesar which makes custom SMA components(very expensive) well see if they can give us something and then talk about reducing the prices in mass production.

One more thing I am trying to do is make my one EAP (electro active polymer) by sandwiching surgical silicone between aluminum wrap...more on that soon

Texture-The opensource braille reader

Below is a sketch of the braille reader we (me,Mishel,Soham) are currently developing.This will be cost effective (meaning it wont cost a fortune) and has features which the current braille readers in the market don't have.We intend this to be the first in the line of many other products to come,including the efforts for a sub 50$ braille printer.We also be developing open source software to be used for text to braille conversion.So wish us luck

Here is the first draft of the design we made

Below is the sketch of how our final product will look like, we are putting in as many ergonomic features as possible, the materials are also chosen so that the device is very nice to the touch.Notice the scroll wheel placed at an angle and the different connector from the previous design.

Now here are pictures of the actual hardware, the one below is the base plate(made from 1mm thick aluminum) , we have given it a matte finish.

 Next we have the scroll wheel and the vibration motor mounted onto it,(the scroll wheel is just the standard mouse wheel)

 I just got the machined acrylic parts today , here are the pictures, these parts will form the boundaries of the braille reader on  the four sides, the material is perspex(6 mm thick)

Then here are pics of the modified USB connector, we felt that having a cylindrical symmetry eliminated the need to grope for the right way to put the connector in, so we gave the usb connections to a 4 pin headphone jack, the male will be on the device and the female will be mounted on a base to allow for easy access of the connector, there is also a normal USB attached to the male connector so that it can be used with a pc which doesn't have the female attachment .The connector  are auto retractable all you need is to tug on them to make them retract( i took this part form a retractable mouse chord).the male end of the connector will be housed in an aluminum tube which will have magnets lined on the inside so that it sticks to the device(which also has magnets btw)

 The schematic of how the actuators work

the current state of the prototype

more updates to come

 we have run into a bit of a snag,it has become extremely tough to fit the SMA wires  into the a small sized enclosure( about the size of a braille cell).......we will be needing a manufactured part onto which we can fit things, which is tough to get (as well as expensive). so we are making a scaled up version of the braille cell (10 times larger)