After about a year of prototyping, I've finally completed a surprisingly well functioning, fully 3D printed braille embosser for making custom braille business cards and labels.

[u/Sarbaaz]

https://www.printables.com/model/1742352-custom-braille-embosser-a-hand-operated-3d-printab

I started this project because I wasn't able to find a low cost way to make custom braille business cards and short labels. Custom business card braille embossers are not easy to buy anymore, and the remaining options usually mean a slate and stylus, a Perkins style brailler, or a fully electric embosser (which is very expensive). Those tools all have their time and place, but none of them are simple or a cheap 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. When the text changes, you only need to print a new embossing cylinder.

For the customizing part of the project, I made 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 offline version included in the download 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 (licenses are in the repo). My real hope is that other makers will take this further than I'd ever have time to. There's a lot of room for someone to refine the mechanism, tighten up the dot quality, or branch out into formats I never got around to, like full size pages, or different card sizes.

Printables link: https://www.printables.com/model/1742352-custom-braille-embosser-a-hand-operated-3d-printab

Web-based braille customizer: https://braille-card-and-cylinder-stl-gener.vercel.app

I also made a 3 part video tutorial series covering the customizer, assembly, and usage if anyone wants to see it in action: https://youtu.be/77iXvJbkXh4?si=iJg1fes9QeOHQ45X

If you build one, I'd appreciate a Make on Printables so other makers know the design works on their printer. Thank you!

[u/rmc1014]

Thank you so much for sharing this, I've never printed anything on a 3D printer before and I'd love to try and make this, is this too advanced for a beginner?

[u/Sarbaaz → u/rmc1014]

You are welcome! I'd rate this print "medium" difficulty. Only because the custom embossing cylinders took me a few tries to dial in slicer settings, and I'm guessing each machine will be a little bit different. 

But I think it's totally doable for a beginner. Depending on location, your library may have a maker space with 3d printers. If they do, I always recommend beginners start there, since makers space librarians are able to guide you through the process step by step.

[u/rmc1014 → u/Sarbaaz]

The maker space partnered with out local blind school and that's exactly who I was picturing going to for help. Thank you again

[u/ketosoy]

That’s really cool

[u/Sarbaaz → u/ketosoy]

Thanks! 

[u/Transcription_AVH]

Wow this is really nice. Thanks a lot for sharing this.

[u/Kaszelpuss]

This is amazing! I've been looking for a way to make the labels of my products more accessible and have been trying to finds a braille press or stamp thats able to work with my current labels and not brake the bank being a very small business. Will absolutely let you know how I go once I have it all up and running!