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13-Year-Old Builds Braille Printer

    • admin@nie.com
    • Publish Date: May 29 2016 3:41PM
    • |
    • Updated Date: Jun 7 2016 7:17PM
13-Year-Old Builds Braille Printer

Shubham Banerjee, a 13-year-old eighth grader, has probably become one of the youngest entrepreneurs to get venture capital funding... 

Shubham’s Braigo

  • Shubham took a basic, pre-existing pattern for a printer and reworked it with new software and hardware enhancements to print out letters in braille. 
  • He named it Braigo. The Braigo’s controller is set up to scroll through the alphabets. You choose a letter and it prints out with tactile bumps on a roll of calculator paper. The print head is actually a thumbtack, which Shubham settled upon after testing a small drill bit and a mechanical pencil.
  • The first prototype isn’t fast, but it proves the concept works. Shubham is working on improvements that will allow it to print full pages of text.
His claim to fame
Indian origin Shubham, based in San Jose, in California, has got funding from Intel Capital to develop a low-cost printer for the blind. It was a flyer asking for donations for the blind that triggered Banerjee’s interest in Braille in December last year. “When I asked my parents how the blind read, they told me to Google it,” says Shubham. Combining his love for building cars and planes using Lego blocks, he came up with a prototype for the Braille printer and named it Braigo for his school science fair. This product was further developed on the basis of feedback that he got. It was at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco two months ago that Shubham was told he will get funding for ‘Braigo’ Labs from Intel.
 
His future plans
Now Braigo Labs will use the undisclosed amount of funding from the venture capital arm of the world’s largest chipmaker Intel to roll out a better prototype and develop more products for the visually impaired. Braigo Labs’ Braille printer is expected to cost $350-500 ( Rs21,000-30,000), as compared to the usual price of $2,000.
 
Others
  • Nick D’Aloisio, founder of online news aggregator Summly, was only 17 when Yahoo bought his company last year for $30 million
  • Similarly, bothers John and Patrick Collison, of payments service Stripe, were 16 and 19 when they sold an earlier business to a Canadian company for $5 million


I was just trying to help people and did not know it will go so far. I am happy about it. But I don’t intend to drop out from school. It’s an after-school thing.
Shubham Banerjee

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