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Well actually, it arrived last month — I’ve just let myself push blogging aside as things have gotten very busy lately.

Based on the feedback we got from my trip to Ghana, we came up with a new design in May. Last month, we received the plastic parts, printed circuit board, and membrane switch (the buttons). Everything fits together really well. After a few tests and some more fundraising, we’ll be ready to order 100 devices to take to our pilot test in the Upper West Region of Ghana. I’m hoping we can actually order 200 devices to also cover the following pilot program in the Bangalore Rural District. This will substantially lower the price for all the units. More on the cost of the pilot devices in a future post.

So here are a couple shots of the product without its gray silicone elastic band:

Talking Book Device prototype showing speaker, ten buttons, and USB cable

Here you can see the ten buttons: a play/pause button in the middle, four programmable arrow keys surrounding it (to move through the audio menus and throughout an audio recording), a record button in the bottom left, two volume buttons in the top right, a home button, and the asterisk/star (*) button used for selection and for audio hyperlinking. There’s also a dual-color LED (red and green) in the top center. Above the buttons and to the left, we have a built-in speaker.

Behind the device, you can see some twine coming out the top, near where we have a headphone receptacle. There’s a hook on the back of the device to allow any lanyard/string to be tied to the device so that it can be carried around the neck or over a shoulder.

The last noticeable component of the device is the USB cable sticking out the right side. This cable normally fits in a pocket in the right side of the device. Here is it shown partly extended. Each device has a cable with male plug and a female USB receptacle (both mini-B type). This allows any user to give or receive an audio recording to/from any other device. The receptacle also makes it easy to copy recordings onto the device from a computer — the device appears to be a mass storage device. Even the device’s audio user interface can be updated this way, which is important when you need the device to give instructions to users in many different languages. It should be easy for anyone to record the operating system’s audio prompts in a new language and then copy those new recordings on to the device. Although normally, a user would change the language of their device’s audio user interface by connecting with a kiosk

perspective shot of standing Talking Book Device

Two early design models with the current pilot prototype

To protect all these ports from dust and water and also to provide a “bumper” to protect the device from impact, the device comes with a silicone elastic band that wraps around the edges. You can see the band in this picture of the device with its predecessors. The band currently has an opening for the headphone port, but the user would need to pull back part of it or remove the whole thing (which is extremely easy to do) to extend the USB cable to for device-to-device copying.

Tags: device, prototype

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 11:21 am and is filed under device. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.