A 7th grader from Santa Clara, CA., has developed a functioning open source braille printer - made from Legos. I am now slightly embarrassed about my crappy X-Wing fighter in which the wings do not even open into an 'X'.


Shubham Banerjee, 12, 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.

The price of Master Banerjee's printer is quite a bit lower than the standard braille printer, which can run into the thousand dollar range.

Banerjee wants the project open source - so that anyone can access the technology, making it readily accessible to anyone wishing to assemble the printer at home - the biggest cost would be the Mindstorms EV3 kit.



Next up, according to Yahoo! Tech, Banerjee is looking to create a printer that can manage full pages. You can follow along with his progress over on the project’s Facebook page.