BrailleBot Teaches You How to Read with Your Fingers
Learning Braille is hard for many people, which is why Mukesh Sankhla invented the BrailleBot for Braille training.
Braille is the de facto standard for tactile written language. While the patterns change based on language, the system is consistent: six dots arranged in a 2×3 grid are either raised or not. The pattern of raised dots correspond to a specific letter, number, or punctuation mark. Braille is ideal because it is relatively easy to print, can easily exist alongside (or over) visible text, and it can be read quickly by people who know it well. But learning Braille is hard for many people, which is why Mukesh Sankhla invented the BrailleBot for Braille training.
The major downside of Braille is that, as a tactile system, it is difficult to enable "rewritable" text in the same way as digital displays, like LCD panels, do for visual characters and pictographs. To change one Braille character into any other on demand, you need some sort of electromechanical system.
That's exactly what Sankhla built. BrailleBot has six holes on its top surface and can extend small pins through those holes to create any Braille character at any time. Combined with an audio system that speaks those characters aloud, this is the perfect device for learning Braille. Like popular language training apps, it can introduce new characters gradually through repetition and increase the complexity over time until the user becomes fluent in Braille.
BrailleBot's brain is a DFRobot Romeo ESP32-S3 development board, which has more built-in capability than most other dev boards. Importantly, in includes servo drivers to control the six servo motors that BrailleBot uses to actuate the dots. A connected DFRobot DFPlayer Mini stores and plays the MP3 files containing spoken characters. Users can interact with BrailleBot through a pair of touch sensors. All of those components mount inside a simple and relatively compact 3D-printed enclosure.
Sankhla wrote some basic firmware to showcase BrailleBot's functionality, but it has much more potential that could be realized if BrailleBot were paired with a comprehensive lesson plan. It could even act as an interactive Braille "display" after a user finishes learning Braille, outputting the same text that would appear on a computer monitor.
This is a free and open source project, so developers and educators are free to expand and improve upon BrailleBot.