The 2023 entry film
Hackaday Prize 2023
Three and a half minutes on how the cell works, made for the entry that won. About 140,000 views.
What I have built.
A Braille display, a Braille keypad, a wind generator and a printer company. The first three are open hardware: the files are free to download and build.
Grand Prize, 2023 Hackaday Prize
The refreshable Braille module
Only about one in ten blind people can read Braille, and the cost of refreshable displays is one of the main reasons.
In a commercial refreshable Braille cell, each dot is driven by a piezoelectric actuator, and that one component sets the price of the display. Mine drives each dot with a printed cam carrying a magnet a millimetre across, so the cell can be made on the kind of machines I build.
Getting there took seven years and one abandoned mechanism. The module won the Grand Prize of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, the last year the competition ran.
We wind the coils ourselves on a 3D printed jig, because electromagnets this small cannot be bought in quantity.
The full build covers the mechanism, the 2016 version it replaced and the first pencil sketch. The project log on Hackaday has the CAD, circuit-board files and bill of materials, and has been viewed more than 103,000 times.
The entry film.
How the Braille cell works, in three and a half minutes.
Best Product and fifth overall, 2017 Hackaday Prize
Tipo, a Braille keypad for a smartphone
Eight of the ten blind users we worked with preferred a feature phone. Glass tells your fingers nothing.
Tipo is a small keypad that plugs into a phone over USB. It has six buttons in the Braille arrangement, plus space, enter and backspace, and pressing a combination types the character. An ATMega 32u4 microcontroller makes the phone see it as an ordinary USB keyboard, so it needs no app and no driver.
It was designed to do a second job as well: teaching Braille to people who have lost their sight recently and never learned it. The electronics are open-source, the parts are cheap, and the enclosure can be 3D printed.
A team of seven built it. It was a semifinalist in two 2017 categories, Best Product and Internet of Useful Things, then won Best Product, a $30,000 prize meant to take a design towards manufacture, and fifth place overall. The files, firmware and seventeen build logs are published.
Power Harvesting semifinal, 2018 Hackaday Prize
The Portal Point Generator
A printed generator, built to charge our equipment on an Antarctic expedition.
I could not find an affordable generator, and running a motor backwards wastes power fighting its own detent torque. So I designed one: a dual axial flux machine, with 16 N52 magnets either side of a fixed stator and three phases across six coils of 30 AWG enamelled copper. Because the magnets sandwich the winding, almost no flux leaks, and the generator comes out flat.
Version one made about 75V peak and over 100W. In Antarctica I coupled it to a printed helical wind turbine, a published design, to charge our electronics. It went with 2041 on Climate Force: Antarctica 2018, and it is named after Portal Point, one of the places it was set up. Eco-Business filmed it there for From Asia to Antarctica, charging a power bank off the coils, and asked me why I built it.
“The information available wasn’t great, so I sought to solve that by creating an open source design, where all the files are shared for free online and are 3D printable, so anybody with access to a 3D printer can recreate them locally and generate power for themselves.”
The build is published, with the CAD, drawings and instructions, and has been viewed 34,500 times. One reader has since rebuilt it with better bearings and an automated coil-winding jig.
On the shore
Assembling the rotor
Putting the printed blades together on the rocks before the mast went up.
Portal Point
Fracktal's banner at Portal Point
The turbine up on its mast, and a gentoo penguin for an audience.
2041
The expedition
Robert Swan's 2041 group on the bow of the ship, heading south.
On film, in Antarctica.
Eco-Business's 2019 documentary on the expedition, and my own Hackaday Prize entry film.
From Asia to Antarctica
Eco-Business, 2019
A documentary on the 2018 expedition. It opens at my part, 12:29: the printed turbine charging a power bank, and why every file is free to print.
The 2018 entry film
Hackaday Prize 2018
The Portal Point Generator explained, with footage from Antarctica.
Since 2013
Fracktal Works
Fracktal is the work I have done every day since 2013.
I co-founded Fracktal Works at nineteen and still run it. We make 3D printers in India, from desktop machines to industrial SLS, sell to more than 2,000 industrial customers, and have made more than 100,000 parts.
More on Fracktal: the machines, a sculpture for Mumbai airport, and the industrial SLS printer we built under a Ministry of Heavy Industries programme.
Everything else.
Open hardware
- Braille moduleGrand Prize, 2023. Open source, still in development, built with a team.
- TipoBest Product, 2017. Printable enclosure, published schematics.
- Portal Point GeneratorSemifinal, 2018. Since rebuilt and improved by a reader.
Writing
- Arduino for KidsPackt, 2017. With Priya Kuber and Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar.
- Hackaday.ioSeven years of build notes, published as the projects happened.
- Hackster.ioThe same projects, written up for Hackster's readers.
- GitHub44 repositories: firmware, board files, mechanism source.
Talks and TV
- TEDxYouth HyderabadTechnology Changemaker.
- Embedded India 2025On the Braille display and how it won the Hackaday Prize.
- The Inventor ChallengeTwo appearances. Three clips are on the Speaking page.
Built something on these designs? Show me.
