Yujun’s Status Report for Feb 24th, 2024

This week, I mainly dealt with our change in design for the braille printer. I began coding the braille translation in python and is able to change each braille pattern into a 6 bit data encoding.

Furthermore, I researched more into brailles and found that grade 2 brailles are used commonly for experienced braille readers and it is normally the grade of braille used in the public. There are 26 new patterns that have to be incorporated for grade 2 braille and they serve as abbreviations for commonly used sequence of letters. While my plan is to implement grade 2 to our braille learning tool, it could be against the purpose of the project which is to start with basic braille and allow the students to have a easy jump into the braille language.

In order to stay on schedule, I am to start learning how to convert the python logic into one that is applicable to the arduino used for our hardware.

Next week, I am planning to discuss the use of grade 2 braille with my teammates and decide on whether to implement it to our code or not. Furthermore, it is our plan to fully decide on how to decode these braille encodings back into patterns for the sliders to read and display (most likely through the uses of multiplexers and decoders).  In other words, we are to have a concrete idea on the functionality of the programs needed for the hardware as the software next week, and finish purchasing the hardware components needed for the project. Personally, I have to come up with a way to decode the encoding into a readable format for the hardware.