12-Year-Old Builds Lego Braille Printer 49
An anonymous reader writes "Shubham Banerjee, a seventh grader in California, has developed a braille printer made from a $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and some simple hardware. He calls the science fair project the Braigo. 'The Braigo's controller is set up to scroll through the alphabet. You choose a letter and it prints it out with tactile bumps on a roll of calculator paper. The print head is actually a thumbtack, which Banerjee settled on after also testing a small drill bit and a mechanical pencil. The first prototype isn't terribly fast, but it proves the concept works. Banerjee is working on improvements that will allow it to print full pages of text.'"
Braille Legos (Score:4, Interesting)
So it looks like his device is a braille paper printer (Which is pretty darn cool), but I wonder if something like a smaller version of Legos could be used to make "eraseable" braille type.
Re:Braille Legos (Score:4, Informative)
There are other printers that can produce "erasable" braille. Some of the most interesting do it with tiny electrical impulses that produce a tactile sensation that is an illusion of dots. This was described in an article [economist.com] in last week's Economist. The article pointed out that far fewer people are learning braille today for two reasons: other technologies replace it for many purposes, and, because of better treatment and prevention, there are far fewer blind people today.
Re: (Score:2)
So it looks like his device is a braille paper printer (Which is pretty darn cool), but I wonder if something like a smaller version of Legos could be used to make "eraseable" braille type.
Pasta sauce?
I can tell you from the experience of getting Legos on a white shirt, that shit is not erasable.
Re: (Score:1)
Legos? What's a Legos? [brothers-brick.com]
Re: (Score:2)
And repraps are stupid because you can just buy a commercial 3d printer.
You are missing the point.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
...software matters, and this kid has NONE
Read the fucking article dipshit:
"He took a basic, preexisting pattern for a printer and reworked it with new software and hardware enhancements to print out letters in braille"
Anyways, my point is this: frankly, the twelve year old kid is far better than you, you pathetic little pimpstick.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You are a classic example of the two kinds of people. There are those that do things, and then there are those that ...........
Re: (Score:2)
The problem has never been about technology, braille embossers have been around for decades ... it's a problem of volume.
Or, the problem is about affordable technology.
As far as the device being useful, TFA mentions that the device is a prototype. I guess you didn't read TFA, or you don't know what "prototype" means.
Re: (Score:3)
A cheap lousy prototype does not improve upon what we've already got.
So...you don't know what "prototype" means. Thanks for clearing that up.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you notice the part about it being built out of LEGO?
Obviously it's not a final production model..
Re: (Score:2)
...he's just been set up by a tiger dad or mom. Big fucking deal.
Nope. Tiger moms/dads are the least likely to give their kids an expensive pile of toys, or coddle them in any way at all. Tiger parents are typically hyper-strict disciplinarians who might threaten to burn their children's stuffed animals [miamiherald.com] if their homework isn't perfect, or if they make anything other than A grades.
As for the rest of your post, well...you sound pretty bitter about something related to childhood. Would you like to talk about it?
Re: (Score:1)
My dad was in military intelligence (the human kind, not the techno kind) and mom a housewife who didn't have a day of schooling. Yet, I caught the programming bug pretty early on (there were triggers which generated that interest of course, but most of it did not come from within my nuclear family). To date I'm the only one who's developed a fully functional Turing-complete programming language in my country. My parents could not help me with that, nor some of the very first programs I wrote as a little bo
not a crock of shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tiger moms/dads are *most* likely to bribe your professor or require contractors to hire you b/c it would be bad "face" if their kid was a failure at life.
Take that 'tiger' superiority and cram it up your...
whatever...
GP's post is acrimonious but it is **totally fucking true**
This kid didn't do this...the kid's parent gave him step by step directions. I had an awesome dad who was a cryptographer in the Navy in the 70s and he taught me **all
Re: (Score:2)
This kid didn't do this...the kid's parent gave him step by step directions. I had an awesome dad who was a cryptographer in the Navy in the 70s and he taught me **all kinds** of awesome shit. That's awesome and I'm thankful. He sure as shit didn't help me write an Orthogonal Time-Division Multiplexing algorythm for my science fair projects though...because that would have been **cheating**...he helped me make a few things but obviously this kid had all kinds of help and most importantly, the article seems to purposely not mention how the kid made all this happen just his step by step.
It's about accuracy in reporting **WHAT IT TAKES TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE TECH WORLD**
if we present this mindless crap as examples of young people doing science...well, we're cheating **them** and **ourselves**
there are **real** kids out there doing stuff at this level with only basic guidance & procurement help
Wow, you sure know a lot about this random kid, to assert all this with so much confidence. Modded insightful too! I'm convinced.
Do tell, how do you determine if something is done by a "**real**" kid, and not a FAKE KID like this one?
Re: (Score:2)
see, it's actually pretty easy to discern the real thing from a cheap, fake Asian knock-off
sorry you can't tell the difference
Re: (Score:2)
there are **real** kids out there doing stuff at this level with only basic guidance & procurement help
So after you rant about how the kid in TFA couldn't possibly have built the printer himself, you go on to claim that other unnamed "real" kids are capable of doing comparable work unaided.
Congratulations. That's some world class reasoning you got going on there.
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I used to be a High School teacher so I know all about what young people are capable of doing.
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I used to be a High School teacher so I know all about what young people are capable of doing.
Being a former high school teacher doesn't explain how you know with such certainty that young Mr. Banerjee relied on outside help to produce his project - especially since you freely admit that there are kids his age that are capable of such work without assistance.
A valid explanation for your ridiculous claim would be something along the lines of "I know him/his parents personally" or "I secretly watch him through his window at night" or maybe even "I'm Professor Xavier and Mr. Banerjee is one of my mutan
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i'm promoting **reality** not some parental PR to boost the kids resume
look at the source of the article, its a blog post by **the kids father**
reality
i'm happy to give respect to a young person who makes an engineering breakthrough or invents a way to do something or cracks DRM...Dvd John is a good example
that's real
you are defending this guy b/c you probably benefit from the same thing somehow...either yourself or your kid
it's bullshit and you know it
Missing The Point (Score:3, Insightful)
The real point, and what makes it interesting, is that is was a 12 year-old who built the thing from Lego's and spare junk. He saw a need, and went to fill it. Good on him, that is the point of these science fair projects, make kids think about the world around them and how to solve problems, even simple ones. Hopefully it sets an example as to how we should be thinking about the world; as a place filled with people who have needs and desires. With these types of kits making it into the homes of regular people, I look forward to the engineering boom that could come out of it. I say an arduino, pi, makerbot, and lego mindstorm for every kid. Let their imagination run wild.
Shubham Banerjee? (Score:1)
Cue passive aggressive racist comments. It wouldn't be /. without them.
How about movable type? (Score:1)
As a Rube-Goldberg device, I'd like to see a Lego printer that assembled "Braille movable type" using "Letters" made of 2x3 legos with selected dots shaved off.
Call it the Legotenburg Press.
A good start (Score:2)
It's a great thing he did, and I hope he can make it something usable for the blind also. There exists screen reader type of braille machines like ones from Seika [seikabraille.com], which I've installed for one natively blind person. These can go for thousands of dollars because the mass market doesn't exist. The person I know also utilizes OCR scanners and speech synthesis. The books and newspapers are provided in audio by an organization for the blind.
I'd guess there isn't much need for paper as the medium, but everything