Hi everyone,
I'd like to build a tactile feedback screen for blind people so they can read tactile graphics.
It should resemble something like the http://www.orbitresearch.com/product/graphiti-plus/. I thought about using Solenoids to create a small interface. Are there better solutions out there or is this an impossible task with Arduino?
Welcome to the forum
What sort resolution are you aiming for ?
I can't really offer much help, but I'm not sure the processor is the hard part of this project.
The actual interface hardware mechanism is the key thing you need to crack. What sort of resolution do you need? Overall size? Movement dimensions?
I'm sure there will be someone on here with some smart ideas on that.
It depends on what's possible, the more the better but at least 15 x 15 pins would be necessary to get a use out of the product.
I foresee several problems
You could drive the solenoids from an Arduino using shift registers but overall a Rapberry Pi might be better suited to this project
Most of the solenoids I looked into are around 20mm in length, so it can get quiet big. The power can be a problem, but I am not planning to make this device mobile or depend on batteries. For the image processing, I want to write/use a tool that interprets the data from the charts to the device. There are some tools out there, that can transform images into tactile graphics, but this will be a huge topic on it's own and also a challenge.
I'll consider your points and will look into them and also check out a solution with a Raspberry Pi, thanks for the responses!
It was not the length of the solenoids that was my concern but their diameter
The solenoids I'll consider have diameters from 10mm-20mm. There are also some solenoids with around 40mm but I'll guess this is already to big to consider.
Why not just put out letters serial fashion on a small device.
If you have a larger area a person won’t be able to feel all the areas , and it’s certainly too small for any graphics .
With just a few solenoids you should be able to reproduce braille letters .
Mon Dieu! Cela devrait être "braille".
a7
That’s easy for you to say … ( corrected it now , nothing to see here …lol )
I want a refreshable interface and it should be used in combination with a chart library and a screen reader, so the device just helps to traverse the chart quicker and helps for orientation and just shows the most important spikes from a chart, so the user can zoom into this parts and slowly get a picture of the chart in his head (for now I only want it to work with bar charts and line charts).
I found something similar what I want with Tactile Rendering With Shape-Memory-Alloy Pin-Matrix | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore (sadly a paywalled paper but very interesting if you have access). I'll think I try a similar solution with Shape-Memory-Alloys, because they are very cheap, small and won't need much power.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.