A cost-effective and portable Braille printer with low noise is designed in this study. To reach this goal, the compressive printing concept is used and the Braille typesetting, the signal transmission interface module, the signal control module, and the Braille printing cell are designed and integrated. To increase the portability, the Braille printer is designed to use A4 size paper and each page can print at most twenty-four rows and twenty-seven Braille characters in each row. The typesetting of the printing page is designed to contain twenty-seven side-by-side Braille printing cells and each printing cell contains two low cost flapper mechanisms for performing the low noise and cost-effective Braille print. The logic signal control module then controls a total of fifty-four flappers. The logic signals are transmitted through the integrated signal transmission interface module based on two common standard personal computer interfaces: Serial/RS232 and Universal Serial Bus 2.0. Subsequently, the pre-processing software is programmed based on the hardware developed. The integration of the software and hardware is successfully validated, and this newly designed Braille printer can be further used by the visually impaired for self-printing.
關聯:
Biomedical Engineering: Applications, Basis and Communications 19(1), pp.53-61
