Shubham Banerjee is a seventh grade student who lives in Santa Clara, California, and has surprised his teachers, family members, community (and the American media, why not say so?) invent a Braille printer with LEGO pieces.
The advantage of its model is the low cost (about $ 350 compared to 2000 that it would cost in the market). He has called it Braigo and prints with tactile bumps on a roll of calculator paper, the printhead is a pushpin, although Shubham had previously tested with a small drill. 
The protagonist of the news is only 12 years old, but seems to feel a special sensitivity for disadvantaged people, and after a campaign of donations to help blind people, he decided to find out more about sign language, and the difficulties they have for communicating. He thus concluded that The price of braille printers is unnecessarily expensive, since in many occasions they are people with limited economic resources.
Shubham's fondness for LEGO (he plays with them since he was two years old), led him to fulfill his goal, building a printer from a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 model (a robot). This utility already exists to make drawings, but the boy has adapted it, getting him to print the Braille alphabet. It works at the rate of one letter every five to seven seconds, although It is planned to improve the prototype.
It is a class project that I was going to present to a Science Fair. Its cost has been reduced to the purchase of the construction kit, plus the complements acquired to perfect a software that would allow it to carry out its purpose
The media that I have consulted that Shubham is overwhelmed (rightly so, if he is only a child). But there is no doubt that at this point he is also very prepared to continue working for his purpose. Now you want to improve the version to print a complete page. Recognize that Your project can help develop a new printer concept, but this claim is great, fortunately his father has engineering friends.
It has not been proposed to patent the idea for not going through an expensive process. And he says that other people can also do it, and even develop it better, always serving interests of those who need it.
The video that accompanies this entry, and others that you can see in the links at the bottom, demonstrate the usefulness of the printer.
