Meet Angad Daryani; The inspiring teenager

Angad Daryani has been called a number of things: child prodigy, little genius, the inspiring teenager, but he can best be described by one word—Maker. Home schooled by teachers who focus on hands on learning, Angad has always been passionate about building things, from improvising already existing software to making custom hardware. When a guy builds a Rep Rap 3D printer at the age of 13, you know there is no stopping him.

Angad’s love for aquatic animals led him to name his DIY Kits company, Shark Kits, whose open source kits are available for Indian enthusiasts at reasonable prices. This one-man-army has supplied Rep Raps to prestigious institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, where he is also currently doing research on Desktop Prototyping with Tree Labs.

His passion for building things led to the invention of Virtual Brailler, a device that converts digital text from Roman to braille in real time to give tactile braille feedback to the tracked finger of a visually challenged person. This low cost ebook reader for the blind is a revolutionary product that could make books accessible to millions of people who currently depend on time-consuming methods like getting braille books printed or unintuitive methods like text-to-speech. This project was developed in collaboration with other engineers and designers at the DIy Workshop, Hyderabad, and the team plans to take it forward, so that they could help blind people know the joy of paperless reading through open source.