12-Year Old Builds Affordable Braille Printer From LEGOs

Shubham Banerjee

This kid has a bright future ahead of him. Amazing.

Shubham Banerjee, a 7th grade student from California, built a braille printer using pieces from the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit, for his school’s science project. Normally a braille printer cost upwards of $2,000, but Banerjee’s Braigo braille printer cost $355 to make.

According to WHO reports, there are estimated 285 million visually impaired people worldwide and 90% of which lives in developing countries. At this moment the cost of a brail printer is more than $2000 for a basic version, thus for many millions of people across the world have limited access. This project uses the Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit costing $349 and some add-ons from Home-depot costing another $5 to prove that its feasible to make a brail printer for education purposes and schools that’s much cheaper. The project uses the base reference model known as Banner Print3r and was redesigned with totally new software to print letters A-Z. The project is named as BRAIGO v1.0 in short for Brail with LEGO. There are endless possibilities to add enhancements in software to make BRAIGO do a lot more. The student wishes to make this project open source, with the design and software readily available for public consumption free of charge. Thus giving a new tool in the hands of blind institutions or even parents with visually impaired children to use this printer at a 80% savings from commercially available products out there in the market.

For updates on this project, you can follow Braigo’s Facebook page, Google+, and Twitter.