Rob Carter called yesterday to announce, with excitement, that their
project to produce a 4-line/40-cell display has been completed. The last
unit was plugged in yesterday. Tests have been going on for some time to
determine reliability. Rob thinks "THEY HAVE IT."
The unit is packaged in a stand-alone case with an a.c. line chord and a
serial port. The driver software is in the box. Screen reading functions
are expected to reside in the user's PC.
Piezo Systems apparently plans to market their display themselves, largely
via the NET. They have a WEB page at braille.com. They also have a
general information page on their products at piezo.com.
Rob says that the talk at Piezo has now turned to cost-cutting
manufacturing processes that could lead to an affordable multi-line
display. You wouldn't want to know how much it cost to produce this first
prototype.
We will stay in touch with Rob, and James Maxwel. You remember James? He
came to the R&D Committee meeting in Baltimore about three years ago to
get our endorsement for this project.
Depending on developments at Piezo, we may have them bring the machine to
our meeting in Anaheim.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:04 PST