Development of electromagnetic actuator for braille cell

Abstract

Braille system is a universal code for visually impaired people to read and visualize image by using their haptic sense without using their eye. Over the few centuries, with the advent of technology, numerous assistive technologies have been developed and widely accessible for the visually impaired community. However, for developing countries such as Malaysia, educational braille based and current assistive technology for visually impaired people to read and visualize such as electronic braille display still lacking. This is because a piezo bimorph actuator actuates most of the braille cell used in the commercialize braille display. This system not only complex due to arrangement of the piezo strip, but it also expensive to produce a reliable system. Moreover, it’s braille cell also has a limited feature, where it can support to display single-line sentence only due to the arrangement and nature of piezo bimorph. This paper aims to develop an electromagnetic actuator for braille cell, where it can support multiple lines of sentence, cost-effective and has the same performance as commercial braille display. Next, to determine suitable design parameters and evaluates the performance of the fabricated braille cell. An experiment is done with three levels of factors, one for the number of turns and the other is diameter which are 100, 200, and 300 turns and 0.1, 0.3, and 1.0mm. The result shows, regardless of wire diameter for coil, the minimum current required to lift the dot will remain the same for the same number of turns. A final number of turns and diameter selected is 300 turns and 0.1mm and required minimum value of current 0.08A to lift the dot. The study approaches towards the development of braille cell that used alternative actuator, which is an electromagnetic actuator to achieve more compact braille display while able to display multiline sentence.