Blind electronics

Doing electronics blind is a headache for a bunch of reasons. This page goes through the ones I've encountered second hand and any possible solutions I've come up with for them.

This page is targeted at those with total lack of vision, may or may not have hearing, and have their other senses and a good range of motion. If you're outside those areas I'd be interested to talk with you and brainstorm how to get past your challenges.

Touching components

Tactility is the name of the game when it comes to navigating the world blind. The same is true for electronics. However there are various risks:

Hot components

Electricity creates heat, sometimes at temperatures where touching will cause a risk of burn. I would say there's two categories of heat to deal with: Controlled and uncontrolled.

Controlled heat is what you would expect from a functioning design; Heat is an enemy to electronics too as it can damage components or change power consumption. A working design found in a manufactured product control heat using heat dissipation devices such as heat sinks. My recommendation on dealing with these components is to be careful as if you're touching something like a plate or a cup:

• Touch it briefly to see how hot it is then decide whether to touch it again
• Use the back of your hand to touch if needed
• Power off and wait for components to cool if possible

Uncontrolled heat happens due to a fault or bad design. The danger from this heat is that it's unexpected and results in a burn or fire. Usually you can detect uncontrolled heat through the following methods:

• Touching a component (can result in burns, not recommended)
• Smell from melted plastic or melting components

I do want to make it clear that heat here comes from passing current through components. If you suspect something is going wrong, remove the current source (usually by just turning the device off) to avoid causing more heat.

Batteries can be especially problematic in this case if there's no way to stop the current and thus heat. If you're using batteries make sure there's safety measures in place to stop the current, such as a fuse.

Powered components

Touching a component can potentially add you to a circuit. Depending on what type of circuit this is this may do nothing, it may damage the component, or it may damage you. There are two particular categories of circuits you should watch out for: Low voltage and high voltage.

The human body does not conduct much electricity at low voltage (I'll use 12 volts as my conservative definition here) so it's unlikely you'll damage yourself by touching a component. It is possible to damage components by unintentional paths between components. There main technique to avoid this is to touch only the ground parts of the circuit such as metal USB or Ethernet shields.

High voltage is a different story (I'll define it as over 50 volts here) as your body may conduct enough electricity to shock you. Do not touch high voltage components. If you're unsure, don't touch the component at all. It will not be an enjoyable experience and it will accomplish nothing.

Charged components

Components like batteries or capacitors can hold charge despite a device being turned off. Everything in the 'powered components' section above applies to these components as they are effectively still on. Removing batteries is likely possible, but capacitors are trickier.

Capacitors can't hold charge long term like batteries. Most capacitors will discharge after a few seconds if not sooner. Touching the ends of low voltage capacitors with a finger can use your body to safely discharge the capacitor. The danger comes from large high voltage capacitors. Do not touch high voltage capacitors.

Electro-static discharge

• Components may hold charge
• Electro-static discharge may damage the components

high voltage

So far the following

This is a big TODO for me to dump my current knowledge.

See the main page for my contact details if you're interested or just leave a comment in the discussion page for this page.

Idea dump:

- tactile electroncis

- deafblind

- electronics and components as an abstract should be accessible to blind people

- data sheets, schematics, pcbs, simulators, graphs, etc

- though hole assembly should be doable one day

- breadboards are doable

- esd mat

- touch is discouraged

- do NOT touch high voltage

- electronics is heavily visual based

- containers to organize things

- dangers of touching things

- soldering and how we can't do that yet

- desoldering and desoldering gun

- breadboards and breadboard wires

- visual people as guides

- cameras, microscopes, etc

- leads and future work

- mouser

- LEDs

- buzzers

- screwdrivers

- parallel/series

- multimeters, oscilliscopes, component testers

- resistence soldering

https://www.ski.org/soldering-basics

https://www.ski.org/smith-kettlewell-technical-file

https://blarbl.blogspot.com/

https://groups.io/g/babamm/