The Product

bREAL is a text to Braille converter. It takes in an online text file and displays the words in Braille, eight characters at a time.

System  Diagram

Our Team

Our team was comprised of four students from Olin College of Engineering – Brandon Chiou, Nitya Dhanushkodi, Kyle Flores, and Mika Ichiki-Welches. We had $250 and less than a semester to deliver our final product.

Brandon
Brandon Chiou is a junior studying Bioengineering. Brandon was our team's mechanical engineer. He worked to CAD the many iterations of our encasing assembly, as well as the latch mechanism that kept our solenoids from burning up.

Nitya
Nitya Dhanushkodi is a sophomore studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was a large part of the programming team, writing code in Arduino C and Python that would interface between our computer, our Arduino, and our circuit.

Kyle
Kyle Flores is a sophomore studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was also a large part of the programming team, and was involved in writing the code for our circuit. Kyle also disassembled and rewired the 12V box that powered our system safely.

Mika
Mika Ichiki-Welches is a sophomore studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. She built the electrical circuit of the system that prevented the solenoids from drawing current from the Arduino. She also laser cut the encasing pieces that held the mechanical system together.