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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.

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.

This week I was able to talk to the CMU librarian about existing support for the visually impaired. Coupled with additional research done on the braille language, I was able to become familiar with the general structure and the standards for braille and also realized that our product is indeed needed for the blind population.

The progress of myself as well as the team is on track and to make sure we are on schedule in the future we are going to meet at least once outside of the class time provided to us every week. We also have been communicating regularly over slack and messages to ensure we are on track.

By next week I plan to have the braille database ready to use for the software, and find ways to encode the braille patterns into a matrix or find a more data-efficient way of storing the patterns to reduce memory usage.