Design and Testing of a Low-Cost Refreshable Braille Display Actuation Technology

摘要

Current refreshable Braille displays use piezoelectric reeds to actuate individual pins. Piezoelec-trics are the standard because of their low power consumption and speed of actuation. One major issue is that currently available displays cost between $5,000 and S 10.000. Other mechanisms could be used, but to date, none has been able to replace piezoelectric actuators. In this paper, a shape memory alloy, FlexinofTM, was selected for the actuator. The new design presented here takes into consideration as much automated manufacturing as possible to help reduce costs from hand assembly. The design itself data on cycle time, lifetime, and actuation speed are presented.