Diseño y construcción de una impresora braille de bajo costo, utilizando plataforma hardware de código abierto.

Abstract

Through the present research, It was designed a low-cost braille printer, using the open source platform for visually impaired people in the canton of Riobamba. It started from a common ink printer, that when selecting and replacing components formed the new braille printer. It was used an electromagnetic coil (solenoid in charge of making relief points or braille, stepper motors, two drivers for stepper motors, an audio player module and a liquid crystal display (LCD) to show the state of the printer. It was used an Arduino Mega model that it contains an ATmega 2560 microcontroller, which It is in charge in receiving the computer characters through the LABview program, which It sends information from a text document (.txt), to control the Engines that through the drivers locate the head in exact positions, and drag the sheet, allowing the solenoid to perform different combinations of relief points for each word, obtaining a physical document braille. The results are within the measurement parameters standardized by Instituto Nacional Ecuatoriano de Normalización (INEN): horizontal distance between the centers of contiguous points of the same cell (2.5 mm), vertical distance between the centers of contiguous points of the same cell (2.5 mm), distance between centers of identical points of contiguous cells (6mm), diameter of base of points (1.5 mm), minimum height of points relief (0.5 mm), obtaining 99 % of Effectiveness in the printing process. It was concluded that the children and young people with visual disabilities in our province can access written information of digital documents. It is recommended that prints be made using this printer do that visually impaired people can easily access the document.