12-year-old invents Braille printer using Lego set
The Braigo printer cost its inventor about $350, making it more affordable than other Braille printers that can retail for more than $2,000.

And because I seriously side-eye this Western journalism trend of never crediting and NAMING the actual inventors in the headlines (especially when they’re young POC)

this inventor’s name is Shubham Banerjee, and he is making his glorious design completely open source, publishing it online FREE of charge! Just remember this kid’s name before some crusty old white dude “innovates” his design and takes all the credit.

We agree with Amy Ratcliffe of Nerd Approved when she says, ”After lightsabers, the items I found to be the coolest in the sci-fi genre were Tricorders. The Star Trek gadgets were practical, solved a heck of a lot of problems, and they looked cool. While there have been many replicas, someone has finally built a working version. It’s not a precise duplicate of what you see in the series, but the spirit is the same. This functional, Star Trek-style Tricorder was designed by Peter Jansen.”

And we think it’s awesome!

The most basic description is that the Tricorder is a self-contained portable sensor. It has GPS, and it can measure ambient temperature, humidity, air pressure, magnetic fields, surface temperatures, colors, ambient light level, ambient polarization, acceleration, direction and distance (ultrasonically).

The second photo show the Mark 2 version (a work in progress—runs on Linux). If you visit Nerd Approved you’ll find a video showing how it works.

The Tricorder is an open source project, so you can learn how to build your own at The Tricorder Project. However, Jansen claims that a version could be mass-produced somewhere down the line.

[via Nerd Approved]

One of the first apps I installed on my Android phone was a really cool free Tricorder app (that I can’t find in the Play store or on Appbrain) that wasn’t much more than a collection of sensors and trek-inspired sound effects, but it was wrapped up in an LCARS interface that made me want to reverse all the polarities.

I love this project, and can’t wait to have one of my own someday.