Re: When is the last time anyone has read a braille book?
in this (controversial) article, a former FS employee claims that the cost of building a 490cell Pacmate was around $400 as of 2006. If the braille costs $1/dot, this is plausible. The last time this article came up, Camlorn listed the components and their prices (not sure where he got some of these, but most can be easily checked):
The actual computer components in the PACMate, by today's standards, the entire sum of the processor and memory, I can buy that, as a consumer, for $35, or less and get it running Linux in a snap. A Raspberry Pi is more powerful. The computer components, with equivalent power of a Braille 'N Speak, including the buttons to have some sort of rudimentary input, the needed support circuitry, and everything including file storage except the integrated speech chip (no one uses these anymore, save for products like calculators, so i discount it): maybe $20. To get storage, add an SD card, any model will do, the equivalent of a PACMate is the lowest end one you can find. The keyboard is most likely just a premade laptop keyboard, easily also ordered from somewhere else, probably also for $10 or so. Plastic molding can be automated, involves a mold, and can easily be made accessible given FS's size. Besides, who's to say that blind people put the actual device together, or that they even designed it i the first place? Given the inexpensiveness of plastic and the fact that the shape isn't significantly exceptional, they can probably outsource it for a few bucks per case, so long as they order in bulk. Is 400 the exact value? Probably not. Is 400 close? Definitely. If you don't believe this, or want to disprove me, I'm sure that a bit of research can yield the needed information to do so.&nb sp; In all honesty, given that the keyboard for the BX model is custom, that one might have a higher cost, but again, not significantly. If human labor is needed, it can easily be minimum wage, too. The circuit boards are probably printed, which means that there's only exactly one slot for everything, with a little card and a picture. if you can solder, someone can teach you to put them together with no prior technical knowledge; if you can't, they can add the training for the soldering iron and make it take a day, possibly with a week of supervision to ensure quality. These devices look complicated, amazing, and etc. The manufacturing process is cheep.
I still can't find any explanation on the cost per dot, and every source says something different. Is it $1? $5? $25? And the big question: why?
Can I find some independent company with the necessary equipment, pay them $2500 (the cost of the B2G), and get a 4
-6 line display?
(Also, I should point out that piezoelectric actuators are largely used for two things, in the mainstream: keeping time, and detecting pressure (to the extent that people are using them to produce electricity by putting them under roads, train platforms, dance floors, or even just extremely noisy places). This means that we could make a piezoelectric display function like a touch-screen, if there was a way to detect sufficient pressure on the dots without damaging the actuators. So, we could make a full screen display, and just draw buttons, like tablets and smart phones. Oh, and about damaging the actuators? They're also used in lighters in exactly that way. However, lighters use a spring-loaded hammer to strike the actuator, so maybe the amount of force required is a bit much?)
I have no idea what the equivalent costs for EAP actuators would be. I mean, Fishing line can serve as a (heat-activated) artificial muscle, and is easily thin enough for our purposes. Actually, I think someone tried to make a smartphone-sized braille display using a sheet of similar material a couple years back. (I don't trust hte heat-activated materials because how are you giong to make them change temperature quickly enough to be all that functional? Wouldn't having your hands all over it keep it warm? What about the electronics? Is there not a similarly cheap, but electrically-activated material? And, again, if so, what are the difficulties keeping it from being made into a braille display?)
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