Joe Birch‘s family is predisposed to failing eyesight. As a result, he decided to build the BrailleBox – a motorised Braille creation device which reads in online news stories and converts them into patterns for the blind. Solenoids were used to project upwards small wooden balls into the patterns which represent letters. The software end uses AndroidThings. The main script runs on start-up and a button press is detected which triggers the retrieval of a news item and the automatic translation.
You can see it in action below: