Welcome to our blog!

Here, you'll find a more personal look at how we created, designed, and built the Portabraille Printer. To read each post, just click on the title! Enjoy!

Meg here! Annie and I screen printed our team shirts with our dot dot dot logo last night! They are super super cute and have everyone’s . . .

We are slowly migrating all of our power sources to a single large power supply. This means we needed to wire a few AC devices . . .

Because of our previous catastrophes with cooling, we have decided to add a fan and some heat sinks to the stepper drivers just to make . . .

Wow! I'm back yet again. Wild! It's Maia reporting back about the Raspi. Essentially, I just enabled and tested SSH which allows us to . . .

Hey there, Nathan here again! Because the holes in the aluminum side plates weren't perfect due to being turret punched by hand, We . . .

We have traced the problem back to a blown EMI bead on the Arduino, and replacing that has fixed our problems. We are still not sure . . .

Wow! What a time! Programming the interface turned out to be more of a process than any of us could have imagined. But we made it . . .

Hello again! It's Maia coming in with yet another software blog! Wow! Just when you thought I wasn't going to throw any more of . . .

Hey there! This is Nathan with an update on the paper tray! Annie's beautiful tray needed a few tweaks for the final version due to . . .

Hello! This is Nathan with a quick mechanical update. We finally have finalized 3D printed side plates! The design of these parts is quite . . .

Hello again! Nathan here. We have now mounted all the solenoids onto aluminum gantry plates. We had to use nuts and washers as spacers . . .

Just hours after populating our PCB we are having some serious electrical issues. One of the traces on our board has burned out . . .

Yooo! It's Maia, yet again! It's almost like I write these with some regularity. Wonky! Anywho, I just finished the usb things. I wrote a . . .

So, update on whether or not Pick and Place is working: it’s not. But, despite that, I managed to populate our PCB within 5 hours . . .

This was a little bit silly. It was really just plugging in a wire! Here we are, a card was created!

Hello again! Nathan here. We have now mounted all the solenoids onto aluminum gantry plates. We had to use nuts and washers as . . .

Hey, Maia again! Happy to announce that our Raspberry Pi is (finally) set up! What we thought would be a simple software task turned . . .

Colin and I (finally) submitted our PCB to JLCPCB! We’ll be waiting a week for the boards to come in, but it’s a monster that has finally . . .

We didn’t technically need a logo, but I wanted to do something a little more design-y for this project and sometimes you have to carve . . .

Hello! Nathan here with a quick mechanical update. So Siddhartan had an old inkjet printer at his house, and brought it in for us to take . . .

Hey! It's Maia! Reporting in with FINISHED INITIAL SOFTWARE!! Don't worry, I'm super jazzed with good cause, I just finished the . . .

The Arduino firmware is able to fire solenoids, move the steppers, and perform other essential actions like homing and loading paper . . .

Today, Colin, Nathan, Maia, and I (Meg was at an origami convention!) trekked out to MIT to interview some users! We’re talking to the . . .

I started working on the firmware to control the steppers and solenoids from the Arduino. The primary concern we have right now with . . .

Happy November, everyone! I’ve been a bit lax on writing blog posts, but here’s an overview of what I worked on for the last sprint . . .

In order to make braille that conforms to size standards, each dot must have a base diameter of 1.44 mm and a height of .48 mm. In . . .

Because our solenoids require 1 A of current at 12 V each and the Arduino is only capable of transferring 200 mA at 5 V max, we need . . .

In order to understand and spec solenoids for punching, we did some review on electricity and magnetism to bring our electrical team . . .

Hello from all of us! This is the start of an adventure! Tonight, we met to finalize our sprint one objectives and plot a course for the next week . . .