I've never used a slate and stylus, I don't get the concept here. I get its a sort of manual way to braille, but slate is a type of stone, and if you were going to produce braille onto it, you would need something very sharp, and powerful to penetrate it. Also, if you wanted the dots to feel like dots, rather than impressions, you would have to do it from the opposite side, which means you would have to braille everything backwards so it appeared on the front side correctly. Still, I don't see how you can penetrate slate without a drill bit or something. They used to use it as roofing materials. Some artists use it to draw on. I've seen flat slabs of the stuff, they're heavy and durable. I just don't see someone being able to penetrate it.

Yeah, slate just refers to the backing surface that supports the paper. You're not penetrating the slate itself. There are also drawing slates that are sort of like a rubbery clipboard, but I found those less pleasant than the cover of a cloth-coated binder, for drawing anyway.
And also yeah, it's kinda tedious to write braille by hand, and you do go right-to-left instead of left-to-right.
Whatever became of that embosser made from Legos? Was that actually the least bit innovative, or was it the equivalent of a science fair model that the media thought could make some ad money?
I remember something about the Canute doubling as an embosser, but I'm not sure of the practicality. Also, is the Canute more than a proof-of-concept?
Then there's capsule paper. You could just print Braille onto it via a printer with carbon-based ink, then run it through a capsule paper machine to get braille that way. While those machines seem to cost a "mere" $10k or so, compared to the Brand New Car / Kinda Old House price of an embosser, that sounds like a much better deal. It even does illustrations, after all. But the paper is over a dollar per sheet, and I seem to remember the machine frequently malfunctioning back in the day, and is there good software for printing properly formatted Braille? Yeah, there are Braille fonts and such, but I'm talking something like "format with Duxbury, send to printer instead of embosser".
Also, in such an expensive field, you'd expect people to try to cut costs when possible, and yet the only instance I can think of in which someone actually took the capsule paper route is a major engineering college. Now, considering how the assistive tech market interacts with businesses, education, and government, I wouldn't be surprised if this is not because of some fundamental flaw with the idea, and instead is due to institutional inertia. But it's better to first assume the professionals know what they're doing and aren't just leaving money on the ground, until stronger evidence appears.
cost analysis estimations: $10k for the machine, vs $45k for a cheap/reused/something embosser. 200 sheets of Braille paper is, what, $15? Vs $230 for 200 sheets of capsule paper. So $50k could buy around $40k pages of capsule braille, vs over 600k pages of embossed braille. ... really? Am I doing that math right? ^Those page counts feel off. Oh, and let's not forget the expected lifetime of the device, cost of maintenance, electricity usage, printer heads for the capsule pages, etc.
So if my numbers are right, and you actually can find a decent embosser for $45k, which is the better deal depends entirely on how much you plan to do with it vs how much money it brings in. If you're a publisher sending out menus all over the world, or embossing another thousand copies of the Bible, or warehouses full of textbooks, you probably want to go with the embosser. If you're an individual, small company, or expect to need lots of illustrations on short notice, you might be better off with the capsule paper machine.
Bla, that means that Braille comicbooks would go for, like, $2/page, and most print comicbooks ... vary in length, but let's say 30 pages for the monthly issues? Times 3 for Braille, and that's being generous given that we're trying to translate a highly visual medium to the lowest detail tactile medium, and that's $200 per issue. Well, crap. Guess it's time to ask Audible and Dollar Shave Club if they want to put ads in Braille comicbooks.

at cae-jones... what about my original idea? modify a modern dot matrix printer to emboss using slightly blunted nails? you can get a dot matrix printer off amazon for around $200. modify it, write software for a raspberry Pie linux computer board with liblouis as the translator and software to make tactile graphics when needed. and if needed, use ESpeak for the printer's tts. Set the stepper motor to its strongest setting and if necessary have it strike the same dot multiple 2 or 3 times to ensure a good dot before it moves onto embossing the next dot.

@CAE_Jones
I believe your referring to the [Braigo] printer, which was a school project using lego mindstorm pieces by Shubham Banerjee, then 13'ish around 2014. He had been funded by Intel and has been working on the next commercial version of the printer as some kind of cloud connected media center, retailing for around 350$. Their site does have an app though that claims to allow you to upload documents you can share and have converted into braille. Like the [Blitab] tablet though there's no word on a product release, little if any progress updates.

The [Canute] looks like their finally moving into production though, says they began finalizing pre-production testing in March 2018. They don't give a final price but say it should be something like a new iphone, around 2-3£ per character with 360 characters, so 720£-1080£? You can [Contact] them to register your interest.

I think though if your looking for a good embosser you should look into 3D printers, since they'll also have a lot more utility. The cheaper ones which require some assembling can go for around 150-200$ and use cheap plastic filament, can do braille and illustrations, or pretty much whatever kind of object you'd like. The only downside is that you have to use a program called a Slicer to carve up 3D models into printer instructions, and they aren't terribly accessible. Its one of the things thats on my to do list to look into, heh. Well, at least there's the [3Doodler 3D Start] pen, they seem to making some initiatives to help get them into the hands of educators and classrooms.

I was under the impression that 3D printers were still comparable to embossers in price. If they're only about 10× the price of 2D printers, that changes quite a lot and leaves a massive pile of money off in the corner over there, behind the ottoman.
I hadn't heard of the Mountain Brailler. I will have to check it out.

The price point for 3D printers depends on a few things, such as number of features, materials such as PLA plastic, metal, resin, etc. speed, and print area. There are cheaper printers that go for around 100$ but the print area on them is fairly small, around 120x120mm, and some of the others that are a bit more around 125$ -150$ like the Anet A8 and similar models require some assembly and fiddling but have a good print area of around 220x220mm and get the job done. Again though the problem is the accessibility of the slicer software, printer controls, 3D modelling, etc. but theres more accessibility prints popping up all the time, educational tools, maps, dice, etc. Honestly at this rate the Braigo will be obsolete before it even hits the market.

You can see a price list for some 3D printers [here] for comparisons.