An Architecture Improvement of Electronic Braille Quran Based on Raspberry Pi

An electronic braille (eBraille) Quran is a braille display that is use to aid the visually impaired and blind Muslims in their journey of understanding and appreciating the Quran in a much more convenient way. It is an invention of University of Technology Malaysia (UTM) since 2009 for the blind people to recite Quran through the Braille system. However, current architecture of eBraille Quran comprises of too many modular components, numerous microcontrollers and complexly designed. Another vital issue is that its architecture still uses old technologies where the firmware updating or data correction process cannot be done remotely. This makes it hard to maintain, repair, costly and time consuming. This study proposed an enhancement of current architecture with the latest technology of single board computer named Raspberry Pi 3B+. The architecture is first designed according to the existing features of the eBraille Quran. Then, a prototype circuit is developed and fabricated for testing purposes of the proposed architecture. Once the circuit is fabricated, an experiment is conducted to test on how well the new architecture manages the intended functionalities, controlling input and output of braille cells, the performance of start-up time and battery consumption. The result shows that the proposed architecture using Raspberry Pi manages to carry out all the proposed functionalities of eBraille Quran. The start-up time is also within tolerable level with only 1 second slower than the current architecture. Battery consumption on the other hand shows that using Raspberry Pi reduces the battery consumption by 1.2% per hour.