Note Teller 2, a money identification device

Earlier i wrote about my collection of currency identifiers. This week I have added an interesting device to the collection, called the Note Teller which was mostly used around 2010. At the end of the post there is also a video about it.

I accidentally found out about this device while researching the topic online. As the United States did not change the Dollar so that visually impaired people would be able to identify it, a court ruling required that an alternative solution should be provided. This is when the Canadian Brytech company started manufacturing the Note Teller device around 2007. This device soon became obsolete, when the National Library Service started providing the iBill money recognizer from Orbit Research free of charge to qualified visually impaired people.

Today it is hard to find good information about the device other than mentions in different articles. Related pages no longer exist, and Brytech is only selling a talking color identifier, but the Note Teller is not listed. This is where I switched into collector mode. I needed to get one.

I started searching on bBay, there were a few used ones, from about $130 all the way up to $290. I wasn’t going to spend that much money on it, until I found an auction, four Note Teller devices for $10 plus shipping. Yes, four, which otherwise I could buy for $1200 if there would be somebody to sell it to me. My guess is that it was a liquidation sale. I put in my bid, and two days later being the only bidder, they put it on the mail for me. The listing said that it did not include an adapter, and they weren’t sure about the condition. I figured if I can make one work out of the four for $10 that’s not a bad deal.

The following arrived in the package. One Note Teller 2 in original packaging. One Note Teller 2 in a case, and two Note Tellers in cases. After a little bit of research I found out that the original Note Teller was upgraded, it is a brand new hardware, and it can recognize the newer US Dollars. There is a place for an adapter on the bottom, but the unit operates with a 9 Volt battery, so there is no need for an adaptor. The original packaging also included printed instructions and a CD, which I assume is the accessible text based instruction, but at this point I do not own a computer that can read a CD. Interesting how quickly technology changes. I also read that the firmware can be updated in case the company wants to release new identification methods for newer bills, maybe the adapter can be useful for connecting the device to the computer, but I could not find out more about this. Also, I read that the Note Teller 2 can be used by deaf blind people as well, I also couldn’t figure out how.

The package also included a battery, which probably was sitting in the box for years so it didn’t work. After we got the necessary four batteries, because I was determined to make them all work, we tried them out with my daughter.

The device is very simple, once the battery is loaded, you have to insert a Dollar bill into the device, and if it recognizes it, it will announce the dollar value, and if it is not able to recognize the bill for any reason it gives an error message. There is an odd way to switch the unit to Spanish with the volume switch as well.

Now I have two new devices in my collection basically for free.

We created a video with Emily to show how it works. Enjoy.