She built a printer that turns your voice into Braille.
Built by Himaja Lingampalli
RUDHRA turns spoken words into embossed Braille, reducing the physical effort and reverse-pattern learning involved in traditional Braille writing.
Lingampalli Himaja, a BTech Electrical and Electronics Engineering student at Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women in Andhra Pradesh, began RUDHRA after visiting a school for visually impaired students and observing the effort involved in traditional slate-and-stylus Braille writing.
Her first prototype used buttons to select the six dots in a Braille cell. She took it back to students for feedback; a student asked why they could not simply speak instead of pressing buttons. Himaja then redesigned the system around voice input.
A user speaks through Alexa, which converts the voice input into text. A Raspberry Pi processes that text and translates it into the reverse Braille pattern required for embossing from the back of the paper.
Stepper motors position the printing mechanism across the page and a solenoid embosses the required dots. Users can create, edit, store and print notes using voice commands, while the system handles the reverse-pattern conversion automatically.
RUDHRA was named India's national winner of the James Dyson Award 2026. The national prize is £5,000, reported as about ₹6 lakh in India, and the project advances to the international selection stage.
This is still a prototype: Himaja has said its current build cost about ₹1.5 lakh and she wants to reduce its size and weight. Her near-term focus is usefulness for students and organisations. The defining design decision came from the people it is meant to serve.