Braille Signs

Is there any way to make braille signs with the handibot ?

For sure--I spent some time pondering this at the beginning of the year--but was discouraged a bit by the expense of the equipment required to make ADA compliant braille signs.

In "olden days" braille signs could be made by milling away an area--leaving raised cylindrical pegs for the dots. However, modern ADA compliant signs are made by drilling holes of a very specific depth into the material and then pressing plastic or metal beads of a very specific size into those holes. The rounded surface being much easier to read than sharp edged dots.

There are tools that can be mounted on a CNC for pressing in the beads along with manual tools that can be used to press the beads into a sign after cutting the holes. However, most of these technologies are proprietary and require the purchase of a license for use. Which seems kind of wrong to me because it is intended for use in making spaces accessible to a blind person...shouldn't we want as much of that as possible?

So I got bogged down in designing my own braille bead insertion tool that could be mounted on a ShopBot--and then got a surge of handibot sales--and everyone got on me about the extended Y--and you know how it goes...

BUT I think that it would still be an incredibly cool project and providing an open source solution to it is something I'm still excited about.

I look forward on seeing more.