Custom Braille Card Embosser - Hand Operated

Description

I started this project last year because I wasn't able to find a quick, low cost way to make custom braille business cards. Custom business card braille embossers aren't easy to buy anymore, and the remaining options usually mean a slate and stylus, a Perkins style brailler, or a fully electronic embosser (which is very expensive). Those tools all have their time and place, but none of them are a simple and inexpensive way to make a small batch of custom cards.The device itself is pretty simple. It's fully 3D printed, hand operated, and snaps together from 10 parts with no fasteners, no springs, no glue, and no electronics. The braille message lives on a separate embossing cylinder paired with a matching counter cylinder. So, when the text changes, you only need to print a new embossing cylinder.For the customizing part of the project, there is a browser based tool that handles the braille translation (powered by Liblouis) and generates both cylinder STLs for you. Your text and personal information never leaves your browser.But if you just read that last sentence and said "NO THANK YOU!", that's completely fair. So there's also an OpenSCAD version included for anyone who prefers that workflow. The one tradeoff is that you'll need to grab your braille translation from a third party website and paste it into the OpenSCAD project yourself, which adds an extra step and is probably a steep learning curve if you haven't worked with OpenSCAD before.The whole project is open source…