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A project log for PenOCR

A pen with optical text recognition that reads text aloud ... potentially helping the visually impaired

brian-chenBrian Chen 12/09/2015 at 03:390 Comments

Unfortunately the project stopped a while ago, since it was simply too difficult to get reliable data from the mouse sensor. The sensor did not seem to be able to see text even with different lighting configurations. Should anyone wish to do something similar to this project, I suggest they use an actual camera sensor.

Recently I've discovered that pen-like products already exist in the market that perform OCR. So the foundations are already there. What in fact needs to be implemented now is some way for the pen to communicate to the user physically. I've had recommendations from friends to use some sort of mechanical system on the pen that creates braille physically on the pen. After research, I have discovered that braille characters can pretty much be represented by a 3x2 matrix. Thus, only 6 physically on/off pins need to be mechanically made. Nevertheless, this is still a rather daunting task and I'm sure their are flaws to the idea.

For now I'll be working on my new project: the ballbot.

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