Over the last week, I’ve talked to Maxwell Davis, part of a team that worked on a Braille display design. You can read more about their project here.

The design, which is similar to mine (although independently arrived at) involves rack and pinion style rods moving back and forth to create the half Braille characters. Their major difference is to add a stepper motor to each rod, resulting in a much faster refresh rate (pretty well whatever the power supply can handle!)

It was originally a submission for university, but now that that is over, Maxwell was wondering about continuing work on it by running a Kickstarter project. If he does, I’ll mention it here, so that you can help with donations. After all, whether my design, his, or any of the ones out there come about, the end result is the same – blind people have a radically less expensive option for text on their computer!