When Lego revealed its line of EV3 Mindstorms robots last year, Bay Area tech companies came up with some very goofy applications. 12-year-old Santa Clara resident Shubham Banerjee just came up with a decidedly more meaningful one: a braille printer. Banerjee noticed that braille printers can cost more than $2,000 and wondered if he could drop the price, according to his father, Niloy. A Mindstorms kit is $350 and easily modifiable, giving Banerjee most of the parts he needed to build the printer. The printer works with regular calculator paper. A robotic arms moves a module that contains a push pin, which pushes down on the paper to create the bumps that form a letter. Right now, one letter can fit on each line on the paper and each one has to be manually inputted. It can print a letter every five to seven seconds.
