A full size keyboard in the front with a 360 cell Braille cell behind it. There is an open lid at the back with a 13” visual monitor. There is a heavy duty pull-out handle on the right side. The device is black with white details.¹

The Canute Scientific from Bristol Braille

Introducing the next generation of the Canute Braille display technology, the revolutionary 360 cell workstation for blind scientists, technologists, students and enthusiasts:

The Canute Scientific.

Designed to empower Braille readers who are studying, researching, working and creating in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A major evolution in multi-line refreshable Braille access, developed within the Braille community, putting the data and sophisticated tools you need to use in your hands, whatever your ambitions.

• Award winning² Canute 360 cell electro-mechanical Braille; 9 lines of 40 cells of hard signage quality Braille with true Braille spacing.
• High contrast 13” visual monitor synchronised to the Braille display, allowing sighted and blind colleagues to work collaboratively like never before.
• Suite of targeted adaptable applications, including tables, graphs, reports and diagrams.
• Workflows optimised for employment and opportunity, whether you are a systems administrator, application developer, physicist, researcher, data scientist or simply just curious and creative.
• Array of connectivity possibilities built on top of a modern Open Source operating system.
• Full sized Qwerty³ keyboard with number pad for rapid data entry.
• Rugged chassis that can be serviced, repaired or upgraded locally, with the right to repair, mod or hack, with up to 12 years warranty.
• Built with sponsorship from the Material Focus Circular Electricals Fund. Built in Britain by a not-for-profit run by with and for blind people.

A full size keyboard in the front with a closed lid behind it.

Unique value with the Scientific Premium

Canute display technology is 1/5th the price per cell of single line piezo-electric and less than half that of alternative multiline Braille display technologies.

The Canute Scientific starts at $6,195 USD (£4,295/€5295) and goes up to $9,995 USD (£6,995/€8595) for Premium options. That’s for nine times the Braille of a conventional display; a full 360 cells.

We also offered $1,000 USD discount (£700/€900) for early adopters who reserved the first twelve Premiums, before they went on general sale. This limited run is called the 1st Edition Canute Scientific Premium.

Those twelve have sold out, but 1st Edition remains open to existing customers upgrading their Canute hardware.

If you’re a new customer and you missed the 1st Edition, don’t worry! Contact us to to chat it through; we will always offer custom hardware, software, support and peripheral bundles to suit your needs and means.

More Braille, more applications, more opportunities

The Canute Scientific has been designed around more than a decade’s feedback we’ve had on our existing products and their prototypes, the Canute 360 and the Canute Console.

It focuses on high value added use-cases in technical and scientific subjects where its use will directly contribute to a blind user’s productivity, earning potential and creativity. These use cases include astronomy, data analytics, robotics, computer science, graph theory, and the list is growing every month.

Specialised applications

• Graphing, including support for climate and weather data APIs, astrophysics and candlestick charts.
• Tables and spreadsheets, including support for CSV, Excel and pre-formatted BRF tables.
• Word processing, including support for DOCX, PDF, LaTeX, BRF, ePub and plain text.
• Computer Aided Design, including support for KiCAD circuit board diagram viewer.
• Schematic diagrams, including support for editable flow diagrams, mathematical diagrams, chemical and biological diagrams (periodic table, molecular structures, etc).
• Transport, street and videogame map viewers.
• Computer Science, including coding, application wireframing, tactile/visual UI development.
• Data analysis, including support for Python Pandas, comparative rendering of data vectors and inline database manipulation within table views.
• User creatable menus and forms for rapid creation of custom applications and interactive fiction.
• User creatable grids, including support for positional tracking for robotics, videogames such as chess and city explorers.
• Presentational tools for business, including report templates and slide-show software.

The lid is closed over the Braille display. A range of ports are accessible, including USB-B, USB-C, 3.5mm audio jack, SD card and three USB-A. The chassis is a three part folded black aluminium with accessible screws for customer repair, maintenance or modification.

Thousands of mainstream applications and resources

Besides specialised Canute applications the Scientific also runs on a fully open and unrestricted operating system, meaning users can install any one of thousands of mainstream command line applications and have it immediately run on both the tactile and visual displays, synchronously.

Support for many desktop applications, such as Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office, is available through an external connection and will be integrated onto the Canute Scientific Summer 2026.

Custom applications to suit you

The Canute Scientific is designed as a tool to be rapidly adapted to suit the varied needs of ambitious students and professionals. Its underlying functions (see ‘open source’, below) are designed to quickly iterate on new applications to suit those needs as they arise, often in hours.

If you don’t want to build these yourself then you can ask Bristol Braille to add it for you. Canute Scientific Premium customers get one custom application with their unit which they can request built particularly for their needs.

Three light grey thumb buttons situated in front of the full sized keyboard, with speaker grills to either side and screws for replacing or modifying the whole front panel.

Collaboration and connection as equals, blind or sighted

Would your organisation benefit from blind people knowing with confidence what something looks like visually? Or from sighted people being able to structure documents in Braille or tactile graphics without knowing the first thing about Braille?

The Canute Console is the first computer to feature parity of display data for tactile readers and visual readers. The visual monitor and the Braille display update to show the same information with the same layouts.

A blind business owner can better check their sighted employee’s work, a sighted colleague can develop a tactile document for their blind colleague, or two totally blind students can develop a spacial, visual application without sighted assistance.

With a Braille display that mirrors the visuals, and visuals mirroring the Braille, undoing assumptions about what blind people can and cannot do, it unleashes new creativity in the field of tactile applications.

Connect to PCs…

As well as a stand-alone Braille workstation the Canute Scientific can also serve as a multi-line Braille display for your existing Windows, Linux or Mac system. Enabling you to make it the heart of a refreshable Braille multi system set up.

Use the Scientific’s integrated keyboard to control your PC whilst the Scientific’s visual monitor mirrors the Braille display’s content. Screen reader supported includes BRLTTY, Orca, NVDA and Windows Narrator.⁴

… and the cloud, and shared drives

With support for Samba, NFS and SSH the Scientific enables file sharing and remote log in on Windows, Mac and Linux. File synchronisation with Dropbox, Seafile and other popular solutions are available through the huge library of applications.

Whichever project you’re working on, you can share data across platforms, pick up and continue on the best system for the particular task at hand, feeling confident the Canute Scientific will fit into your workflow.

The lid is closed over the Braille display. The visible ports from the back are the power socket, 40-pin out and external WiFi aerial connector. The folded aluminium chassis includes a heavy duty pull-out handle on the right side.

Made in England, longevity guaranteed

Building upon the original innovative Canute technology, the Scientific goes several steps further producing a more durable and field maintainable system in a lighter, stronger chassis.

We commit to maintaining support packages, warranties and spare components sufficient to keep each machine running for up to twelve years. Improved production processes mean it can more easily be customised and maintained in the field.

This is thanks to our sponsors Material Focus, whose Circular Electrical Fund allowed us to release a device designed to last, reduce electrical waste and empower Canute owners everywhere.

Built to do the job

We build each and every Canute in our workshops in Bristol and Exeter. We’ve spent over fifteen years designing and building the kind of Braille displays we and our community want to use ourselves in our own lives. This is the culmination of that work.

That’s why the Scientific is 1/4th lighter than our previous design, the Canute Console. It has a lower profile and an integrated soft grip carry handle. It has more ports than any other Braille display to date because we like options and expect it to be doing serious work. Its is radically open for user repair and upgrade, because that’s the kind of freedom we want for our hardware.

Built to make discoveries

You can make the Scientific the centre of your project development. The Scientific is compatible with all Raspberry Pi breakout boards, sensors, drives, cameras, robotics kits, audio and video extensions, GPIO boards and more, which can be added the the Scientific internally or connected externally via the 40 pin I/O out.

The Scientific can interpret video input, RS232, IEEE 1284, numerous other serial and parallel connexions and can be used to control laboratory equipment and read back data from said equipment as spatial tactile read-outs in graphs, diagrams or tables.

Open Source and the Right to Repair

Bristol Braille is committing to making the hardware and software of the device open so customers can maintain, upgrade and repair their machines independent of Bristol Braille if they choose to. As such, the Canute Scientific is released under a license allowing you to modify, hack or tinker with your system.

Chassis blueprints, circuit diagrams, firmware and the bill of materials and assembly manuals are under development and being made available to customers as they complete. These will all be viewable on the Scientific itself in the appropriate spatial applications. The Canute Scientific is available as mains only or with an optional battery pack.

On top of that Bristol Braille maintains Open Source repositories for the Canute Scientific’s custom Tactile Commons⁵ applications. We invite and regularly accept contributions from the community to these repositories and once a month we meet as Braille Space, a hackspace dedicated to creating new Open Source tactile applications.

Prices, upgrades and shipping

The Canute Scientific starts at $6,195 USD (£4,295/€5295). Upgrades for existing Canute owners start from $3,995 USD (£2,695/€3395).

The Canute Scientific base unit comes with two year warranty and is mains operated. The Scientific Premium comes with a four year warranty, battery pack add-on, custom flight case, and the unique offer of a custom application, built to fit your workflow.

Warranties can be extended for up to twelve years. There are options for up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of memory. We ship anywhere in the world or contact us to find a distributor and stockist local to you.

A generous upgrade and reuse scheme for existing Canute owners saves as much as $5,000 USD (£3,600/€3395) by servicing and reusing your existing Braille display cells and, if you have a Console, the visual monitor. All new chassis, processor, electronics and connectivity, plus it will reset the warranty and add a further four years to it.

Check our price lists in full. Put down a deposit or buy the Scientific. Card, Paypal or bank transfer accepted.

A full size keyboard in the front. Behind this the lid is closed over the Braille display.

Technical specifications

The Canute Scientific is a powerful and flexible system built around the Canute’s 360 cell display technology, the Raspberry Pi 5 computer, and the principle of user upgradable options.

System and software:

• Free and Open Source
• OS: Raspberry Pi OS (Debian based) running from the command line in XTerm
• Built in Braille screenreaders: BRLTTY, ORCA
• Compatibility as a peripheral display:
  • Multiline: BRTTY on Windows/Linux/BSD/Mac and Orca on Linux
  • Single line: NVDA on Windows⁷ and Narrator on Windows
  • Future support intended for: JAWS on Windows, Voiceover on Mac.

Braille display:

• Braille cells: 40 cells by 9 lines
• Braille cell type: Six dot
• Braille quality: Hard ‘signage’ Braille; cannot be compressed during actuation or once actuated; once set locks up
• Cell dot height: 0.5mm
• Cell dot radius: 0.6mm
• Cell dot spacing: 2.5mm
• Cell spacing: 6.5mm dot 1 to dot 1
• Line spacing: 15.5mm dot 1 to dot 1 (10.5mm dot 3 to dot 1)
• Dot material: White Delrin (POM-H)
• Actuation: Addressable per line, sequential refresh of addressed lines

Dimensions, chassis and power:

• Dimensions: 14.5” x 13.5” x 1.4” / 37cm x 34cm x 4cm (when open, add 0.4” / 1cm height for lid when closed)
• Lid depth when closed:
• Weight: ~5KG (TBA)
• Three part aluminium chassis designed for in-the-field modification and repairs without full disassembly
• Built in heavy duty suitcase-like carry handle for convenience of travel
• Aluminium and ABS-like powder printed lid covering the Braille display, with 13” high contrast visual monitor
• Mains power: 19V 5A
• Battery add-on: TBA, bundled with Premium

Processors and ports:

• External ports will be modular and interchangeable but by default include:
  • 40 pin I/O
  • Wifi aerial extender connector
  • 3x USB-A
  • 1x USB-C out, including video out
  • Full sized SD card slot
  • 3.5mm combined audio jack
• Raspberry Pi 5 as main computer with:
  • Broadcom BCM2712 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU
  • 512KB per-core L2 caches and 2MB shared L3 cache
  • Options for 4–16GiB of LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM
  • 2.4GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi⁸
  • Bluetooth TBA⁹
• Modular user-modifiable internal break-out board array
• (TBA) Raspberry Pi Zero as second computer on Braille display PCB
• 2x reflashable ATmega32u4 on Braille display PCB

Video and audio series

Its only been out a few months but check our Youtube series for some of the amazing things people have been using the Scientific for to date:

So what will you build?

There’s never been a better to build something, anything, be it hardware or software, using Braille. Make it work for everyone, make it on the Canute Scientific.

Contact us to let us know your plans and ambitions. We probably want to work on them with you.