This week, I mainly worked on researching the hardware side of the project despite being in charge of the software due to the fact that the hardware implementation of the braille grid was more complex than we assumed.
We were behind the schedule in the beginning of the week, yet we caught up by having an extra meeting on Friday morning where we researched together and finalized our design. The only issue is that we couldn’t order any components we thought of last week as our hardware design changed significantly.
The original design which used solenoids to push brailles turned out to be too costly in terms of power input. The amount of power it needed to hold all of the solenoids could also generate a lot of heat in the process. Thus, I presented an idea I found on the web which used a a stepper motor which would slide a long block that contained all the braille push patterns on it. Thus, we now only need two motors per braille cell.
In terms of the software, I pseudocode of the translation was made which takes a braille to alphabet data and translates each alphabet to 2 numbers. For each column, there are 6 braille patterns possible and for each one of them a number was assigned.
By next week, I need to finalize the translation part of the code which is only possible when we as a team finalize whether we are going to use a raspberry pi or an arduino based on the complexity of our implementation.