[BRLTTY] Pneumatic braille based on balls in a tube

[timothyhobbs at seznam.cz]

Thank you for your comments. I have researched the history of braille 
displays and my understanding is that it goes like this:

For the past 40 years, there has been new a miracle technology which will 
bring us cheap multi-line braille displays announced every 6 months. Each 
time a technology is announced, the inventor is interviewed in the news 
paper (page A4, bellow the fold) and subsequently anointed as a saint 
(figuratively of course). After the single news article, the inventor 
disappears from the face of the earth. Did you read about the latest one? 
Some Chinese design student "invented" a braille camera. Won some sort of 
award for drawing a picture of a camera with dots on the back. Absolutely no
mention about how those dots are going to move. News media went crazy about 
"how it's wonderful how modern technology is opening up the world for the 
blind". But you're still reading this on a clunky old (clunky new) piezo 
display, aren't you? Has "modern technology" really progressed so much in 
the past 40 years?

Pneumatic systems have been tried which actuate rods. My system is 
different, it moves balls around by blowing them through a tube. Of course 
noise is a thing to worry about in any system, but there is nothing 
fundamentally noisy about pneumatics. You've probably come in contact with 
two problems with pneumatic systems which cause them to be noisy. One is, 
that they are often not air tight, so that the air seeping out of them 
"whistles" or "pshhhhes". This is really a problem of bad design or bad 
manufacturing. The second problem is the use of compressors to compress the 
air into the system. This is completely unnecessary for a device as small as
a braille display where the pressures are low. I am not going to give up on 
the idea because it might be noisy. Currently, there are no commercial multi
-line braille displays.

Tim


---------- Původní zpráva ----------
Od: Mario Lang <mlang at delysid.org>
Komu: Informal discussion between users and developers of BRLTTY. <brltty@
mielke.cc>
Datum: 23. 4. 2015 17:40:07
Předmět: Re: [BRLTTY] Pneumatic braille based on balls in a tube

"<timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> writes:

> How will the pneumatic braille system work?

Without having read your complete message, I'd like to raise two
questions:

1. Have you researched the history of braille displays? I have a vague
rememerance that a pneumatic system has already been tried.

2. How do you plan to deal with noise? As a full-time braille user (8
to sometimes 16 hours a day) I can not really imagine using a pneumatic
system since this will likely generate quite a bit of noise which will
be a problem for me personally, and for my co-workers sitting in the
same office as I do.

-- 
CYa,
⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕
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