I’ve been working on the project for some time now. I haven’t put it on Thingiverse because I’ve been prototyping it – but I saw that there is now a challenge for assistive technology, so what better time than now?
This idea came about when a friend and I competed in a 3D Printathon at Brandeis University outside Boston, Mass… It was a 24 hour event to create something 3D printed that benefited social justice… This is what we came up with. We did not have enough time to finish in 24 hours, yet still came in second… The actual development took me the better part of the summer.
Now I only posted my phone cases here, none of the code, boards, or anything else… If you look at my profile and designs you’ll see that I’m very open about free sharing and open source – and I plan on making BrailleTooth FULLY OPEN SOURCE, however, like I said, I spent a lot of time and money developing this, I went into a bit of debt and spent most of my time at home working all summer getting all the bugs out and figuring out the best electronic configurations… I’m currently beta testing the prototypes at a local school for the blind and the students that are testing it love it…
I’m an engineer and not a business man – really I’m a horrible capitalist – I’m a lot more Tesla than I am Edison – but regardless of that I really want to see this make it to the market… So I plan on launching a Kickstarter shortly… I want to launch this as a non-profit that makes, sells, and shares accessibility products… Once I get to that point, where I can make these in large quantities – all my designs, code, and board schematics will be full open-source.
I want this to end up being a community effort all of my prints print without supports and single extruded on any capable FDM/FFF like Makerbot, Ultimaker, or and RepRap build…
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
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