For my final project, I have a few ideas of what I want to do, but one of the ones I’ve thought of the most was to make a refreshing braille display system for the MTA subway lines. This is framed within an accessibility context, as I was thinking about how blind people use the subways. I know that certain subway systems have bumps on the yellow warning lines that are for the blind, but I wondered how they would know what stop they were at. How would they know if they arrived at, for example, Chambers street? Without asking someone else, usually the voice over the speaker is too garbled or it’s too loud on the train.
Basically, I wanted to integrate a refreshing braille display onto the train that would communicate with another device through MQTT. That other device would be hooked up to a GPS device that would store the location of the train. If you were at Chambers street, it would send that information back to the display, which would print out the braille equivalent of “Chambers.
For my design, I’m thinking there are only 4 sections driven by mini push-pull solenoids or piezoelectric devices. Each of the 4 sections would form a letter of the subway stop. At Chambers, it could be “CHBR”, at Canal, it could be “CANL”, and so on.