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Francesca’s Status Report for Dec 6

This week, I’ve accomplished a lot personally, which I am very proud of. I’ve been responsible for most of the software implementation for this project, and it is complete! We were able to achieve 99% OCR accuracy, which we stalled at for a bit. I did this by switching from Tesseract to EasyOCR, which has proven to be more accurate for images we take with the Raspberry Pi. We take the picture with a button press, which is then translated to text. This text is then fed to a LLM, which cleans any errors and highlights the most important text we want to print with braille. This works really, really well.

We were able to finalize and code the next steps, as well. The text string is then converted into a string of numbers, which I’ll detail here: say you would like to print the word “hi”. To print h, we need two columns. For the left column, this is a top dot, a middle dot, and no dot. We can represent this as 1, 1, 0, and can interpret this s binary, making it a decimal 6. We repeat for the right column of the h, and for any other letters (in this case, i). The ends up with the string 6224. Then we wrote the code to have the Raspberry Pi read this string and make servo moves that correspond to the corresponding numbered actuator movements.

We were also able to finalize the code to get the speaker up and running, so the device asks the user to confirm the word about to be printed before proceeding. I’m glad we got this to work, because for a long time we were wondering how to have the user interface work with the knowledge the user is blind.

We were running a little behind on the hardware still, so I’ve been helping Bella and Abby with some 3D printing and design testing. We’ve been trying some different printing wheel prototypes to get as accurate of text as possible. As we move into this week, we will complete this prior to our presentation (!!!) and video submission. As for the final report, we have internalized the feedback that was given to us for our previous paper, and are making vast improvements prior to Friday.

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Team Status Report for Dec 6

The biggest risk of our project right now is the inconsistent printing. The software is working correctly and the hardware pieces are moving as expected. We are working on machining different pin variations to overcome this problem, but multiple iterations have not worked. There is a possibility our final demo will not have the printing that we anticipated. For testing, we are placing everything in the final casing and will be getting our final weight for portability requirements. We are doing user testing for easy of use, we unfortunately will be doing this with non-visible impaired users, but used feedback from the school from the blind and the ODR throughout our process. We are continuing to work on the pins and will be able to get a final force test for them. Our OCR is working up to our standard of accuracy as we test it on physical objects in addition to taking pictures of labels we have pulled up on the screen of our laptops to use more variety. It is successfully working on curved objects.

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Bella Woodard’s Status Report for Dec 6

I finalized the mechanical design of the embosser head and the device casing, completed the CAD files, and 3D printed and assembled the parts.  Progress is behind because we had to revisit our embossing approach, which required redoing the original casing design. The last steps are to ensure we’re getting the expected physical printout. Next week we will focus on finishing the final report to get back on schedule.

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Abby’s Status Report for Dec 6

This week, we wrapped up our mechanical design and construction. The software side is working to our standards, one change we made was moving on from Tessaract to EasyOCR. This is a relatively quick change, all that needed to be done was download the new program and replace it in the script where Tessaract was used. While Tessararct worked up to our standard for the demo, we believe once we incorporated pictures on the Rasp. Pi camera, there were quality differences that were not visibly noticeable to us, but hindered the OCR. I worked on the final testing of the embosser. We are unfortunately having issues with inconsistent printing, but all the mechanisms are moving as we designed. There is a possibility the final demo will not be able to show as high quality prints as expected, but we are continuing to trouble shoot. We are excited for the demo and will be wrapping up this weekend.