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634 points david927 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
1. tdeck ◴[] No.41343389[source]
I'm trying to make it easier for Blind people to get into electronics as a hobby. There are many fascinating hardware, software, and UX challenges here that almost nobody is working on. Things like reading circuit diagrams, identifying pins on components, debugging circuits, laying out things on a breadboard, identifying wires, identifying resistors, testing components, and much more are largely unsolved Despite all the barriers, there are some Blind people who build electronics projects, sometimes including soldering, but they usually have to develop their own tools and workflows almost from scratch.

Since I'm just one guy with 100 ideas, I have to try to apply my skills where they can have the most impact. My current project is converting existing circuits from Fritzing format (which is usually displayed graphically) into a textual format. I wrote about it in these three blog posts:

1. Premise, ways to represent circuits: https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-1/

2. Why Fritzing? https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-2/

3. Actual output examples: https://blindmakers.net/posts/accessible-schematics-3/

I'm also working on a 3D printed single character Braille cell that can be added to any Arduino project, and has only 3 simple parts to assemble. Unfortunately I haven't posted about that yet.