Design of a single electromagnetic braille cell

Abstract

Visually impaired usually use a universal code called a braille system for them to read and visualize images by using their haptic sense without using their eye. Over the few years, with the advent of technology, many assistive technologies have been developed and are widely accessible for the visually impaired community. However, educational braille-based and current assistive technology for visually impaired people to read and visualize, such as electronic braille display, is still lacking. This is due to the fact that most of the braille cell used in commercializing braille display is actuated by piezo bimorph actuator. This system is not the only complex due to the arrangement of the piezo strip, but it is also expensive to produce a braille display system. Moreover, its braille cell based on piezoelectric actuator also has the limited feature, where it can support to display single-line sentence only due to the arrangement and nature of piezo bimorph. This research aims to design a single braille cell based on electromagnetic actuator technology. The braille cell can support multiple lines of the sentence, is cost-effective, and has the same performance as a commercial braille display. In order to determine suitable design parameters and evaluates the performance of fabricated braille cells, an experiment is done with three levels of factors, one for a number of turns and the other is diameter which are 100, 200, and 300 turns and 0.1, 0.3, and 1.0mm. The result shows, regardless of wire diameter for coil, the minimum current required to lift the dot will remain the same for the same number of turns. The final number of turns and diameter selected is 300 turns, and 0.1mm and required minimum value of current 0.08A to lift the dot.