8/6/14 Assembly

Today was spent assembling the Modular Beast.  Turns out, the tensioner pin holes are too small.  As a result, we had to resort to super glue and fishing line.  Now I know why we never used fishing line before.  On the bright side, the knuckles snap to the RIT Arm palm very well.  Almost too well.  They don't acutally come off.  But that's okay with me, they shouldn't need to.  After adjusting the thumb bend I thought I fixed and widening the finger slots, we started printing a new one.  The RIT Arm should be done by tomorrow, and then we should be ready for the presentation.

Knuckles, fitting to the palm.

Evidence of the knuckles delaminating because the are not flexible.

To fix the delamination of the knuckles, I decided to add a small slot in the center similar to the way the pins are made.  This way the knuckle is flexible enough to not crack when it is attached. This will hopefully be the final change and as we head into our last day we hope to have everything assembled and ready to go.

That's all for today!

Alex + Sam

8/4/14 Final Week Begins

As we enter the final week of this program progress begins to slow. Today we sent off our poster to be printed and if I may say so myself it looks pretty good! At this point we have basically made all of the necessary modifications to the RIT arm and modular beast. We can only work as fast as the printers which unfortunately take hours per print. Today, Sam and Frankie came up with a plan to notch the fingers for the RIT arm so they will work in the new splayed configuration. Further testing will be done on this tomorrow. I (Alex) cleaned up the modular beast model a bit and helped John laser cut some parts for a lamp based on a Thingiverse design.

Today from 4pm-8pm Frankie hosted a group of 11 high school level women engineers and they were planning on assembling John's solar lamps and sending them to less fortunate children in Guatemala. Due to this class and the slow pace of printing, we left the lab a bit early today.

Well that's all for today, hopefully soon we will have all of the parts printed and uploaded to Thingiverse!

Alex + Sam

8/1/14 Finishing Up Drawing and Finishing Poster

Today we made all of the final changes to both the RIT arm and the modular beast so we can begin printing and assembling the models for next week. These parts are fairly large so printing takes quite awhile. In our downtime between prints, work continued on our poster. Because our poster is due on Monday we won't be able to include any actual pictures of these devices, instead we assembled and took screenshots of them in Inventor/Rhino.

One of the modular beast design photos included on our poster.

Although not as exciting as usual, today was a necessary day and we are right on track with completing everything by next Friday for our presentation.

Alex + Sam

7/31/14 Fingers & Phalanges and Finishing Up Modular Beast

Today was a pretty productive day.  Frankie's back and because he gave me the files to his fingers, I was able to make progress on the arm today.  I beefed up the tricep cuff with some ribs to support it and tweaked the palm to fit Frankie's phalanges.  Through Inventor's assembly mode, I was able to look at how the fingers would fit to the palm and was able to adjust the knuckles accordingly.  Here's a shot of how it should look.

Now that I know they fit, the next thing to do is find a way to connect the phalanges to the palm.  I would like to do it without cutting them in half and screwing them together.  Feel free to message me on e-NABLE if you have any ideas about that.  I'll talk to Frankie tomorrow to see if he has any ideas as well.  On the bright side,  I won't have to do any work when it comes to putting pins in the fingers, because Frankie already did it. 

Tomorrow is a short day, so I plan on taking some quality pictures of the RIT Arm and Modular Beast.  I will probably end up ordering some springs for the variable grip too.

Work continued on the modular beast today, all of the parts finally printed! After talking to Frankie and going over the e-NABLE feedback about our compression fit design I decided to adapt a dovetail design instead. This design is still very simple to print (minimal supports needed) and it works very well.

The new dovetail design.

The Modular Beast in the real world!

After putting everything together Frankie pointed out that the gauntlet seems to be scaled smaller than the rest of the hand. This is a fairly quick fix and hopefully after tomorrow I will have a larger gauntlet to print. I also started printing Sam's bike attachment, that should be done printing tomorrow.

Overall today was another busy and productive day!

Alex + Sam

7/30/14 Printing Continued and Publishing Modular Tensioner

Printing continued.  Printing issues continued.  The day was spent managing the printers as we printed parts for the modular hand and arm.  Not much to say about that.  I spent some time drawing up a claw to demonstrate with the modular beast. The claw intended to be an attachment for biking.  In the end, it turned out to be quite terrifying.

See what I mean?  The lower claw closest to the palm is meant to support the biker leaning up against the bike handle bar. The longer front claw is supposed to wrap around the brake handles.  When the biker wants to stop, he or she pulls the claw towards themselves to pull the brake.  That's the plan at least.  I know this will be a pain to print though.  And it might not be strong enough.  However, if it doesn't work, it can still be used for demonstration at our presentation.  

As with Sam I (Alex) spent most of my day printing parts for the modular beast. In between prints I redesigned the mid gauntlet (it looks much better now and should hopefully be stronger) and published the completed modular tensioner block to e-NABLE. 

The compression fit gauntlet and tensioner block published on e-NABLE.

Hopefully the last modular gauntlet design!

The modular tensioner block wasn't met very well by the e-NABLE community who don't like to rely on compression fittings. I kind of agree with them because every printer is setup/calibrated differently but these types of designs are very strong and easy to print (no supports needed). Either way I think I'm going to stick with this design for the presentation.

We are trying to get all of our design work done this week so we can spend all of next week printing/assembling and getting ready to present our poster. This has been and will continue to be a very busy week but time flies when you are having fun!

Alex + Sam

7/29/14 Printing Parts and Starting Poster

While we wait for new parts to print, Alex and I have done a bit of preparation for the final symposium. First, I did some work on the final designs for the RIT Arm.  As it turns out, my idea of cutting material cost on the forearm cuff was a huge waste of time. I thought it would be a good idea to save time and material by cutting holes in the cup.  Turns out, it takes more plastic to print the supports with holes than it did without the holes.  Talk about a waste of time.

The original forearm cup took about 5 hours to print and only used 69 grams of ABS.
The "material saving" version takes 77 grams and 2 extra hours.

 After putting the finishing touches on the RIT Arm redesign, I began work on the poster.  This included typing the intro for each of our projects.  We plan to have a section about the e-NABLE community and it's purpose, as well as sections for the work we did on the RIT Arm and Modular Beast.  We hope to show our progress and spread the word about e-NABLE at the same time.

While Sam was working on the poster I (Alex) began printing parts for the modular beast. I finally got the tolerance on the tensioner block to fit perfectly! I also squared off the tensioner pin holders on the gauntlet that I talked about yesterday. After doing this I added some extra support to the gauntlet so the tensioner block doesn't appear to be "floating". My modified modular gauntlet was printed today but it turned out to be too flimsy so I added some extra material. It doesn't look the greatest but that can always be changed later.

The new gauntlet with extra support for the tensioner block and square tensioner pin holders.

The new mid gauntlet, not great looking but hopefully functional.

That's all for today.

Alex + Sam

7/28/14 Finish of Arm Editing and Modular Hand

Today, I (Sam) believe I finally completed the editing of the RIT Arm.  Thank god.  I'll go over them with Alex to see what else needs to be done, but I think it's good for now.  I think we should start printing it in blue or teal to be able to tell the difference between our arm and the RIT Arm.  Then we can use that in our presentation.

The palm was finished today.  The fingers are splayed and staggered, which will be paired with variable grip to increase strength.  Work was done to the tubes inside the palm to make stringing easier and make movement lag less.  A bar drawn in the knuckle joints to allow for a finger to close around it.  The file also allows for changing the bars into hole for pins.  Here's a picture of the progress.

While Sam was hard at work on the the RIT arm, I (Alex) continued work on the Modular Beast. Today I adapted the tensioner block connecting design I talked about yesterday to the gauntlet. I am still having a few problems getting the tolerance correct, but that should be a quick fix. Unfortunately, I printed the entire gauntlet before realizing that the tensioner rests were still set up for the old hex style tensioners. This is just a minor detail so it's not worth reprinting, but I will have to change that for tomorrow.

Yesterday's design adapted for the gauntlet.

Today, I also added slots to our mid gauntlet, which should allow for our new tensioner block to be easily attached and detached without restringing. This is a very minor detail but will be extremely important when assembling this hand.

A small detail but extremely important.

On another note, we began working on our UR@UWM poster today. John made a similar poster, which now hangs outside the DCRL, and he offered to share his files so we can match it as best we can. We have our layout set and now it's just a matter of sitting down and actually doing the poster.

That's all for today, overall it was a very productive one!

Alex + Sam