LEGO is one of the world’s best known toy brands but while most children are content to build a LEGO Death Star according to the instructions, 12-year-old Shubham Banerjee from Santa Clara in California, just built a Braille printer instead.

The Braigo printer uses a pin mounted to a manoeuvrable arm that is is programmed to print out any of the 26 standard letters of the alphabet onto a roll of standard calculator paper. The printer is limited to only being able to print one letter per line, at a time and takes around five seconds to print a single letter out.

Braigo is built using the LEGO EV3 Mindstorm kit which is also available in South Africa for just R3 599, a fraction of the cost of a Braille printer which can be as much as $2 000 (roughly R22 000). The kit consists of the LEGO bricks and sensors themselves as well as software for Mac and PCs that allows for users to program additional instructions like the Braille letter that the Braigo printer uses. The LEGO website has a collection of downloadable projects with building instructions both from the LEGO team and from fans as well.

Banerjee has made a series of YouTube videos like the one below which demonstrate his printer in action and he already has plans to open source the project and the instructions to build the printer in the hopes that in can become a cheaper alternative for people in developing nations who would otherwise never have access to this kind of technology.