The Braille Project

How it works?

Simple flow diagram:

The mobile app

Flutter based application and responsible for the followings:

• Image to text ocr using tesseract.
• Translating tamil to braille.
• Text speech using on-device api.
• Finally sends character to be displayed to api server.

The API server

Flash based rest api and responsible for the followings:

• Host a api endpoint for mobile app to send character to be displayed.
• Converts the received character into binary format where each bit represents braille dot.
• Sends the converted binary data to MQTT server.

To run:

$ cd api_server
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python server.py

MQTT Server

It's a message broker between api server and the hardware.

To run:

Install Mosquitto

$ cd mqtt_server
$ mosquitto -c mosquitto.conf

Hardware

• Receives the binary data from mqtt server and based on each bits, pulls the pin down for 0 and pushes pin up for 1.

Components (for single character):

• 1x Esp32
• 3x DRV 8833
• 6x solenoids