Braille Trainer

WORK IN PROGRESS

Purpose of this project was to gamify process of studying reading in Braille for people who risk loosing their eyesight. We came up to idea of making a gamepad-looking device with tactile display and a couple which has three main modes:

1. Scrolling the alphabet and displaying a letter in both Braille - through tactile display and (as we live in Russia) Cyrillic - through LED matrix.

2. Selecting a letter from list in Cyrillic and displaying selected letter in Braille.

3. Writing letter in Braille with buttons on gamepad and displaying through tactile display and LED matrix.

Step 1: List of Materials and Components

For this project we used:

6 micro servo motors http://roboparts.ru/products/sg90-servoprivod-9g

1602 LCD display http://roboshop.spb.ru/lcd-1602-blue

i2c extention board for 1206 display http://roboparts.ru/products/4022216

8x8 led matrix with controller module http://roboshop.spb.ru/DIY-led-matrix-MAX7219

arduino uno http://roboshop.spb.ru/arduino-uno-ch340

pwm/servo extention sheild http://roboshop.spb.ru/PCA9685-Shield

buttons http://roboshop.spb.ru/button-kolp

4mm plywood and 4mm plexiglass

5V DC power supply

a bit of 1.75 PLA wire

Step 2: Sketching 3D-modelling and Prototyping

Concept art was developed by team designer but was changed due to productional and technical difficulties (we didn't want to use 3d-printing as all printers in our lab were overcrowded and mechanics didn't fit in gamepad-like housing).

Current solution requires only laser cutter and 4mm plexiglass and plywood. To make parts of the device cut .dxf files from BrailleDXF.rar

Step 3: Dealing With Electronics

Surprisingly, different controllers and extention sheilds didn't conflict with each other yet it was a bit tricky to make them work all together

Here are some tutorials for all types of controllers we used. (2 links are in Russian, but I'll find English tutorials eventually)

http://arduino-diy.com/arduino-svetodiodnaya-matri...

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-16-channel-pwm...

https://geektimes.ru/post/255812/

Braille.rar contains Arduino sketch I wrote (copy+pasted from examples and modifyed)