A Cubed Design
A Cubed Design is a team of students working to make a refreshable braille display. As a consultant, my main role has been to design the mechanism that powers each of the braille cells.
A single braille cell consists of 6 dots in 2 columns of 3 dots each, with a standard spacing of 2.34 mm from center to center of adjacent dots. A single line of text is made up of multiple cells with a distance of 3.86 mm between cells on the same line and 5.48 mm between lines. The challenge presented to me was to design a mechanism that would fit within the provided space and be repeatable up to 7 cells per line and 2 lines of text while minimizing the total footprint required within the device.
The current iteration of the design consists of two independently powered discs, each with a pattern of raised and lowered spaces. The braille dots are connected to pins which ride along the ridges on the disc, and are present above the surface of the device when on a raised space, but remain below the surface of the device when in a lowered space. The smaller disc in each cell operates the top row of dots, while the larger one operates the remaining two lines. The discs are designed to allow any combination of the pins to be raised or lowered, thus ensuring that all characters are possible. The diameter of the larger disc is a mere 6 mm, which allows the cells to be infinitely repeatable while maintaining the standard spacing without impacting the overall footprint of the device as all components can be located directly below the cell they operate.