Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 76 | Tool that translates printed text to braille |
Abraham Han Blas Alejandro Calatayud Cerezo Samuel Foley |
Raman Singh | design_document1.pdf final_paper1.pdf photo1.jpg photo2.jpg presentation1.pdf proposal1.pdf video |
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| # **Tool that translates printed text to braille** Team Members: - Blas Alejandro Calatayud Cerezo (bac10) - Abraham Seungyeop Han (shan79) - Samuel Foley (safoley2) # **Problem** According to the World Health Organization, currently there are around 39 million people who are legally blind around the world. Right now there are not many resources available for people who can only read braille to read physical written text from a book or magazine, and those that are available are very expensive. # **Solution** Our solution is to create a tool that can be placed over printed text and translate it to braille so that blind people can read it. This tool will be divided into two parts that will be connected between each other through several wires that will transmit power and data. The first part will be a handheld device with a camera to recognize the letters in a word. The user would hold this handheld device with one hand and place it on top of written words. The second part will be a box that will contain the pcb with the microprocessor and an external battery module. It will receive the images taken by the camera, process them to recognize every letter on the word and finally output on top in braille the characters of that word one by one using pins that can be pushed up and down to create braille characters. The person using this device will place one of their fingers on top of the moving pins used to create the braille characters to read the printed text. After showing all the braille characters in a word, the user can simply move to the next word for it to be shown in braille. # Solution Components # Subsystem 1 - Handheld Housing The handheld housing will have the camera sensor attached to it, which would be transmitting image data to the microcontroller. The housing will have to be ergonomic to hold and made of some lightweight material, like plastic. We may additionally add some way for the user to attach the housing (e.g. velcro straps) for convenience. # Subsystem 2 - PCB containing the MicroController A custom PCB will be designed in order to connect all other subsystems. The PCB would connect the pin motors for the braille “display”, the handheld housing containing the camera sensor, and the external battery module in order to power all the other components. The PCB would also control the recharging of the battery module to ensure optimal battery health. The microcontroller will take images from the camera sensor to process the text characters in the image. The image processing, or more specifically the OCR (Optical Character Recognition), will be done through open source computer vision and machine learning libraries such as OpenCV or Tesseract. The microcontroller will also control the motors that will drive our pins to form braille characters. Also, a Raspberry Pi or a similar microcontroller will interface with the microcontroller used in our custom PCB as a more powerful chip may be required for better OCR performance. However, Arduino could also be a viable option. # Subsystem 3 - External battery module An external battery module will power the whole system and: 1. Be lightweight for ease of transporting 2. Powerful enough to sufficiently power the whole system 3. Have theoretical “all-day” battery-life The battery module will be made up from LiPo (Lithium Polymer) batteries for their high energy-density. Potentially multiple batteries hooked up together for a battery array depending on the energy needs. Such a module would need to have a casing of some sort (simple plastic casing would suffice) in order to protect the batteries from the outside environment. Some downsides to such a battery module would be that LiPo batteries require extra care in their recharge cycles as they must be evenly charged, and also not overcharged. Further, LiPo batteries can become hazardous if punctured, and such a safety hazard would have to be addressed through the design of the casing. # Subsystem 4 - Motors for Pins Linear actuators controlled by the microcontroller will be used to move up and down 6 small bars through holes made on top of the box to form braille characters. The bars required to form each character in braille will move up and down in a synchronous way so that the user can read them with their finger. # Criterion for Success - The moving handheld camera can take pictures of every letter in a word and send them to the microcontroller. - The microcontroller can recognize every letter in a word using the images sent by the camera. - The microcontroller can translate the recognized letters into a series of braille characters for the pins to make. - Linear actuators can push pins in a synchronous way to create braille characters that are easy to read. |
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