Is the Arduino suiting my Project?

International Deutsch
1

Hello Guys,
me and my brother started a small project some time ago.
He is a mechanical engineering student in his third semester, and I am a software engineer in my fourth semester.

Its about controlling a set of pins/actuators up or down.
Our goal is to create "braille" (the written language for blind people) by text.

A) Our Basics
For me I can tell that I can code C# quite well. But Java is also going for me. I already saw people controlling Arduino over Visual Studio so I thought it would be suitable to start with that.

My Brother learned more theoretical things. But owns a 3D printer and learns quite quickly.

  1. Material
    To be honest we dont really know what we want to controll yet. We know we need some kind of micro-controller, but we are not quite sure what to controll.

To be a little more exact:

There should be something like this:

............................................................
............................................................
............................................................

we have three rows of Pins which can go up or stay down. Like a boolean. 0/1
lets call this set of pins above a "unit".By lifting those Pins or not lifting them, braille can be generated.

I want to gather 3-4 units under each other

pretty much like this:

u1
u2
u3
u4

So we need to find something to controll via arduino which is equal to one pin which can go up if needed.
The displayed dot above: " . " needs to be quite certain thing like a really small actuator. We did not find anything suitable yet.

I hoped to controll each line of pins from the units like an array:

........................ a1
........................a2
........................a3

so a1 could be : a1[true,false,false, true, true,false .... etc]

which would be for a1 up, down, down, up, up ,down etc]

B) Execution
For sure we will need things like cables and resistors to connect our arduino with the certain devices/ Pins.

  1. Can the arduino controll that much pins? Is it suitable for this project
  2. What kind of energy source is needed to provide enough for the Arduino? Would a PowerBank be suitable?

I hope i could display our problems properly and you understood what we are up to for the most.
Thank you for your time and your ideas.
Triceps

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