Making Braille Signs out of PCBs

November 2, 2017November 1, 2017 fustiniassistive technology, braille, hackaday, PCB ArtLeave a comment

Making Braille Signs out of PCBs

[jg] recently passed some damaged Braille signs and took on the challenge of repairing them. Informed by his recent work on PCB lapel pins, [jg] immediately thought of using circuit boards for this project. He’d noticed that round solder pads made for uniform hills of solder, and this reminded him of the bumps in Braille.

http://jg.sn.sg/braille/

He began by reading up on the standards of the Braille Authority of North America, which stipulates a dot height of 0.6mm. He loaded up the PharmaBraille font system and laid it out the dots in photoshop, then and imported it into KiCad and laid out the boards. When the PCBs had arrived from OSH Park, [jg] soldering up the pads (lead free, but of course) to see if he could get the hills to 0.6mm. He’s experimenting with different methods of melting the solder to try to get more even results

SoundBeacon

April 3, 2017April 3, 2017 fustiniaccessibility, assistive technology, Audio, BLE, Bluetooth, ibeacon, wirelessLeave a comment

Patrick Van Oosterwijck created an audio BLE beacon that can be activated by the vision impaired to find exact locations of doorways, bus stops, crosswalks, and more:

SoundBeacon

The idea is that a blind person uses a navigation app, and can query to see “what is around”. In the list of beacons that are around, they can tap the one they want to know the location of and it will start to produce an audible signal for a short time.

https://hackaday.io/project/15595-soundbeacon

The BLE module is configured as an iBeacon and allows connections. It has a battery service and an “Immediate Alert” (AKA “Find me”) service.

Patrick used the following to build the prototype:

A 550 mAh 3.2 V LiFePO4 cell
A #LiFePO4wered/Solar1 prototype to charge the battery
A 5.5V, 0.6W monocrystalline solar cell
A Silicon Labs (formerly BlueGiga) BLE113 module
A beeper that works very badly (better solution needed)
And a IP65 enclosure

xorbit has shared the booster for loud piezo beeper on OSH Park:

PiezoBoost

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Sip And Puff

September 1, 2016September 1, 2016 fustiniassistive technology, hackaday prize, hackaday.ioLeave a comment

Hackaday highlights Jason Webb’s impressive assistive technology project:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Sip And Puff

A sip-and-puff device is an assistive technology used by people who cannot use their hands. Being a quasi-medical device, you can imagine this technology is extremely expensive, incapable of being modified, and basically a black box that can’t do anything except what it was designed for.