Steve pointed me to an interesting article about using PlayStation Portables with children who are deaf .

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I'm continuing to think about the usb visual alert for people who are hearing impaired. Tonight I saw this article on writing a linux USB driver and it points to this source of cool controllable LED lights .

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Gretchen pointed me to this page at the CITEd research center. Lots of interesting links to research and strategies for using multimedia to help students.

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In reference to my earlier post about the USB-driven visual alert for people who are hearing impaired.

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MobileASL is a video compression project at the University of Washington with the goal of making wireless cell phone communication through sign language a reality.

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Shelley Tabakman of the NC DHHS asked about some sort of visual alert for hearing-impaired users of email and IM. They'd like to be notified of an incoming message by a signal visible when not looking at the screen. The INSTEON developer kit looks like the right goods.

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I can reliably detect many simple targets and generate key events in real time using a web-cam and an ordinary piece of paper with printed targets. What are the important characteristics of the targets?

1. They must be meaningful to the user.
2. They must be detectable and easily distinguished from whatever will obscure them by the computer.
3. They must have an associated key, mouse or other event to control the computer.

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The tiny pager motors ( VPM2 from Solarbotics) work great with the USB-1024HLS. I can drive them with the 15mA source capacity of the USB-1024HLS. Using duty-cycle modulation I can control the strength of the vibration. The 4-wire cable I used for each set of 3 is too stiff allowing vibration to couple from one to the next. I'm going to switch to long flexible pairs stripped from a flat cable. That should allow more freedom in placement and less coupling.

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I bought a USB-1024HLS from Measurement Computing for an experiment with tiny pager motors as a cheap Braille display. For $149 you get a tiny brick with screw terminals. It works great. Their library is easy to use from Python using ctypes. I'm guessing USB timing limits it to 125 updates per second. I've got it blinking LEDs while I'm waiting on the pager motors to arrive.

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Alex says the Brew development envrionment for Qualcomm phones is free. Perhaps we could do the Morse-code text messaging for deaf-blind people with that.

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