BrailleCursor: an Innovative Refreshable Braille Display Based on a Single Sliding Actuator and Simple Passive Pins

Abstract

In this work, we present the design and development of BrailleCursor, a patent pending full-size Refreshable Braille Display featuring 40 Braille cells and based on an innovative method: it uses a single actuated cursor for refreshing Braille cells composed of passive pins. In particular, a single electromagnetic actuator, moved on a linear slider, is capable of refreshing a full row of passive pins: each pin consists in a simple metal cylinder and can be reconfigured in a low or high state by an external magnetic field. This solution disentagles the cost of the device from the number of Braille cells and pins. Finally, we experimentally evaluated the performance of the prototype, including embedded electronics and control interface, in terms of rendering errors with respect to the reference Braille characters. The technical features of our proposed method allow us to start to design and develop a dense matrix Refreshable Braille Display.