Boy, 13, builds Braille printer with Legos, starts company

[kpete]

Shubham Banerjee, right, world on his Lego robotics braille printer as his dad Neil watches at home...

The California eighth-grader has launched a company to develop low-cost machines to print Braille, the tactile writing system for the visually impaired. Tech giant Intel Corp. recently invested in his startup, Braigo Labs.

Shubham built a Braille printer with a Lego robotics kit as a school science fair project last year after he asked his parents a simple question: How do blind people read? "Google it," they told him.

Shubham then did some online research and was shocked to learn that Braille printers, also called embossers, cost at least $2,000 — too expensive for most blind readers, especially in developing countries.

"I just thought that price should not be there. I know that there is a simpler way to do this," said Shubham, who demonstrated how his printer works at the kitchen table where he spent many late nights building it with a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit.





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http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c3a26239b4064054a62e07f94008691a/boy-13-builds-braille-printer-legos-starts-company#overlay-context=article/0c88d45cc3c8488ba16f4e568c3f623d/japan-selling-talking-robots-wont-try-make-sense