Micks Distractions

While I was waiting for the PIC bits to arrive I started fooling around with the physical look of the MICK braille keyboard.

I tried getting a rough idea with the kid’s play-dough.


That didn’t work too well, the playdough kept on getting soft. So, then I went out and bought a couple of sheets of styrofoam to carve into a basic shape.


This ended up with a much better model of the final product. But I still wasn’t happy with it.

So I mixed up some plaster and moulded my hand to see if I could get a really comfortable natural grip to my keyboard.


And refined it a bit more.



But the end product would be really hard to manufacture, expensive, and also bulky. But it’d be really cool to have a moulded keyboard like that. Oh well – I’ll leave that for later. So something a bit simpler…..

So I cut up some more styrofoam to be a bit smaller and slimline. Simpler, easy to manufacture and I can chuck it in my pocket.



This is how to hold it and where the keys will be placed. This particular one was a bit small for me, (my fingers are too cramped), so I made a slightly larger one that I didn’t take a photo of. The flat bit where the balls of my hand are will also have the 1.5″
LCD screen, and will flip out to give extra support to my hands..



So now I have a design in mind, I’ll need to make a model of it. The rough procedure is this:

1. Create negative mould – similar to the styrofoam models I made, but I’ll make it out of wood. I find I can work with wood better, and can get more defined angles. I can also create the negative straight away instead of creating the positive, then the negative from that.
2. Paint the negative with wax – This will stop the epoxy from sticking to the mould.
3. Layer on the epoxy with fibreglass matting for strength.
4. Trim off excess bits, including the holes for keys, LEDs and joystick.
5. Drill holes for fixing./LI>

I’ll post up this when I do it.

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