Week 7 - Visit from Maryland School for the Blind

This week, I did some more experimentation with the VizTouch program. With this, I figured out how to print out a VizTouch graph with the two-color feature of the MakerBot Replicator Dual. After that, some of my co-workers and I helped some visitors from the Maryland School for the Blind with a tour of the UMBC campus. In this tour, we showed some of the prints we made with the MakerBot to the students there.

Week 6 - Text and Braille

This week, I started work on figuring out how to use the MakerBot and OpenSCAD coding to merge extrusion of alphanumeric characters and Braille. This is significant because not very many of the population with visual impairments cannot read Braille, so this can extend the Viztouch program to make it more readable to a wider audience (even to sighted people). I also made my own library of Braille characters in the OpenSCAD programming language. One of the aspects of my Braille library is the ability to change the height, diameter, and area of the Braille characters. Throughout the week, I experimented with the size of the Braille characters, printing out each Alpha-Braille letter with the MakerBot.

Week 5 - Another part

This week, I was tasked with helping out with a similar project to the VizTouch project I have been working on. This project is a collaboration effort between UMBC and the University of Maryland, College Park, and it is designed to make photographs more accessible to the blind by means of the MakerBot 3D printer. I have been taking several photographs and running them through the software to as part of a sort of debugging process for the program. As I ran pictures through the program, it generated 3D models for each of them.

Week 4 - DXF

Week 4 saw somewhat slower progress than the previous weeks. Some work that has been done trying to improve the making of bar charts, but it is still hard to put the full bars into DXF files rather than just their outlines. Also, I have tried to extend the VizTouch program to make it take two functions rather than just one. I am still having trouble translating the data into a DXF file.