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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