[NFB-Braille-Discussion] Electric braillers

Rasmussen, Lloyd lras at loc.gov
Mon Jan 6 14:40:32 UTC 2020


You may be able to write slightly faster on an electric Perkins brailler, but not that much faster. It takes time for the styluses and embossing head to come together and squeeze the paper or plastic, and then time for the embossing head to move to the next cell. And because there is no type-ahead buffer in the device, you have to wait for the mechanism to do its thing before you begin typing the next character. I still maintain that you will be disappointed if you expect much greater speed from this expensive brailler. 

Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled
Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20542
202-707-0535     https://nls.loc.gov
The preceding opinions are my own and not necessarily those of the Library of Congress, NLS.


-----Original Message-----
From: NFB-Braille-Discussion <nfb-braille-discussion-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Josh Kennedy via NFB-Braille-Discussion
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2020 8:41 AM
To: nfb-braille-discussion at nfbnet.org
Cc: Josh Kennedy <joshknnd1982 at gmail.com>
Subject: [NFB-Braille-Discussion] Electric braillers

Hi,
First, just do a google search for electric perkins brailler and you will find the electric brailler I plan to buy. Second, I got an email from perkins products and the person said the electric perkins brailler will emboss just fine on thermoform and plastic label sheets. Why is the electric perkins louder? The electric perkins brailler is louder because it uses solenoids, coils of wire that act as magnets when electricity is applied, it uses the solenoids to strike or hammer the styluses into the paper and it hammers it against a metal die in the size and shape of a braille cell into a dot-shaped indent and that is another reason it is louder. A solenoid or solenoids are striking metal styluses hard and very fast against a metal die or plate, so metal hitting hard against metal quickly will make lots of noise.  very fast. So when you press keys on the electric brailler, your key presses activate electric circuits that send a message to the solenoids in the perkins brailler c  arriage or emboss head and then your desired dot combination is hammered into the paper probably in one tenth or maybe one twentieth of a second and immediately afterwards the carriage advances to the next braille braille cell. So you can see why the electric perkins brailler would let you write much faster? Because you just have to press the keys very lightly just like you do with a computer keyboard or when writing with a braille display. So you can write very fast because the solenoids and other components or electrical parts are doing the hard punch-the-paper, work, for you, letting you therefore type very fast while still getting good dot quality. 

Josh


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