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Museum in a Box

It's always fun when people come and show us what they do with their Boxes.

Yesterday Dr Alex Ball from the Natural History Museum visited and brought his collection of pollens, insects, sand and sugar 3D prints.

He uses them with him Museum in a Box to explain microscopy and scale. 5 pence coins for scale 🤣

A transparent Museum in a Box is on a table next to an array of 3D prints. There's an actual 5 pence coin, next to a larger 3D printed replica - scaled up to 5 times size - and an even larger one at 10 times real size. There are more 3D prints of a wood ant head; fly head; daisy and dandelion pollens; and grains of sugar and sand - all scaled up to a size where you can handle them to feel what they're like. Finally, there are some 3D printed "cards": rectangles about the size of a playing card with raised lettering describing the various 3D prints (daisy pollen, sand, etc.) in both visual and braille English. The cards have a small copy of the 3D print of the item that they're labels for as a bas relief in the top right corner.
#GLAM#museum#weeknotes
Adrian McEwen

For I've been doing a tiny bit of experimenting with the RNIB's braille font in FreeCAD to see how easy it would be to create the sort of "cards" that Dr Alex Ball has been making for his visually-impaired @museuminabox

Initial experiments look promising.

Screengrab of an isometric view of a grey rectangle, rendered in FreeCAD. Along the bottom edge of it there's a pattern of raised dots from some braille text
#Braille#weeknotes#GLAM
Feb 14, 2025, 02:05 PM·Public·Web
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Angela Glansbury 🚽

@amcewen @museuminabox
(the braille text in the above image says "museum rock")

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Adrian McEwen

@floppyplopper @museuminabox oh that's super interesting!

I wasn't paying too much attention to the text and focusing on how well the text extruded, etc.

I thought I saw something when finding the font about not being able to just type things normally and have it be legible as braille. Is that not the case? I mean, I typed "museums rock" just to get some text, and you can read it 👀

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Angela Glansbury 🚽

@amcewen @museuminabox
oops, it does say "museums rock" not museum rock.

how does your font handle "with", "and" and "of".

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ducksauz 🦆

@amcewen @museuminabox

That's a good start. They do look both a little tall and could also use some rounding over on the top edges so fingers can smoothly run over them rather than get hung up on sharp edges. The specs for braille can be found here:

brailleauthority.org/size-and-

brailleauthority.orgSize and Spacing of Braille Characters | Braille Authority of North America
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Adrian McEwen

@ducksauz @museuminabox yep, definitely just a start, but will be much improved thanks to the feedback and pointers I've got in this thread 😀

The height was very much just plucked out of the air to see it it extruded nicely, and trivial to fix. I think that guide will let me work out font-size and the like too, which was another random choice so far.

Rounding the tops is a good call. Will have to see if there's an easier way in FreeCAD to select all the tops without doing them individually

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