Braille Business Card Stamp

=Problem Definition= The objective of this project is to create a simple, more robust, and more durable design for a 3D printed braille business card printer. The device should be fabricated from primarily 3D printable parts, but also be sized appropriately to minimize cost while maximizing functionality and longer-term reliability.

Background
Today, open-source designs for printing braille onto existing business cards are available. This makes it relatively easy for one download the design and fabricate the components using a standard 3D printer. In many cases, design users may print out the components at a local library. While these designs may be helpful, they are often found to have very low durability, or may not function correctly if printed with poor quality.



Deliverables
1) An updated design for 3D printing a reliable and cost effective device.

2) Documentation of the design including 3D printable models and drawings.

3) A manufacturing plan and instructions including complete BOM and estimated cost for anyone to manufacture.

=Design Development=

Braille Indentation test


The indentations for braille have been standardized following the ADA Laws and Regulations standard for braille placement and reading. This tells us the dimension of the dots that should be formed from how big they need to be, to depth, and spacing from one another. However with the stamping configuration that we had in mind in our design, our team did not know the best way to dimension the extruded and inverted bubbles to help form the appropriate sizes of dots. This lead us to a development of rapid prototyping, 3D printing multiple revisions and testing on the business card stock to demonstrate the tests.

3D Printer Tolerances


When printing out 3D parts They do not come out the exact dimensions that you wanted to print out, they will go to the nearest tolerances specifications that you have placed in your setting of the slicer software. And because of this we had to test our design specification dimensions to make sure that our character letters could slide through the slots that we had filled out for them. During our testing phase we found out that we need a tolerance of 15 thousands of an inch to make the parts snug and tight.

Prototype 1


The following picture above show case our prototype 1. It is designed to be flexible in allowing users the opportunity to quickly change the letter characters. For a regular business card we are able to have a 3 by 10 matrix of characters that the user is able to use. The prototype is used like a stamp press. You slide in the desired characters, place in the business card, and close and press the braille letters into the business card. Giving a readable clean cut business card with the persons name in contact information.

=Team Members=

=Additional Documentation=