12-year-old makes discounted Lego braille printer

A seventh grader's knowledge pale scheme turns into a mission to expand a customizable low-cost printer for the sightless.

Shubham Banerjee, a California seventh grader, is one of those children whose spirit and mind expand well past his own being and into the the wider earth beyond. For a science fair scheme, he contemplated the subject of braille printers, which can cost upwards of $2,000, and determined there have to be a improved method.

The better way he came up with involved the clever use of a $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit along with a few bucks worth of hardware from Home Depot. He took a basic, preexisting pattern for a printer and reworked it with new software and hardware enhancements to print out letters in braille. The result is called the Braigo.

The Braigo's controller is set up to roll through the alphabet. You choose a letter and it prints it out with tactile bumps on a roll of calculator paper. The print head is actually a thumbtack, which Banerjee settled on after also testing a little drill bit and a mechanical pencil.

The first example isn't terribly fast, but it proves the idea works. Banerjee is working on improvements that will let it to print full pages of text.Banerjee isn't content to just sit on his creation. He is in the process of making it all open-source so people wherever can generate their own Braigos and advance the software to extend its capabilities. He hopes it will be particularly useful in developing countries where it's simply not practical to buy an classy braille printer.

The Braigo Facebook page is continually updated with details of the mission. Banerjee's labor at such a young age is just the create of what should be a promising vocation in science and manufacturing. He's just captivating it one Lego hit at a time.