Learning braille comes with many challenges for children, not the least of which is that there just wasn’t a way to practice that’s both inexpensive and easy to use. Existing devices use only friction to hold balls in place, commonly leading to balls falling back in unexpectedly, loosing a “pixel” and making for a confusing learning experience.
Our client’s dream was to bring braille to as many children as he could reach by creating a device that is operated with just a simple magnetic stylus to pull steel balls into place to form the letters, drawings, or anything else.
The greatest challenge of this project was to design a system that not only can hold a small steel ball at the correct height until it gets pushed by in by hand, but a system that could be replicated hundreds of times in multiple sizes on the same part without breaking the bank.
Any additional spring or locking part would also have to be purchased and assembled for every single hole on both sides of the device. And to top it off, the holes had to be close enough together to accurately represent braille.
Our solution was to create a pair of two plastic fingers that sits under each hole. The fingers can easily be tuned in thickness to ensure that the balls were held with the perfect amount of force.
More importantly, any number of fingers pairs could be molded on the same part using the simplest possible injection molding tool with no additional assembly or parts needed, leading to an inexpensive and repeatable solution to an incredibly challenging problem.
The two finger solution could also be alternated in direction to keep holes close enough to meet our requirements, and could be used for two different sizes of holes without another design process.
