Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Pin hinge joints



I worked for some time with the notion of doing a biomimetic approach to constructing a telepresence hand by using mixed plastics extrusions. It turned out that the finger joints were made with what amounted to a fluid filled bag harnessed in with ligaments. I could do the ligaments but had no hope of printing a fluid filled bag at the scale required by a human-sized hand.


From there I've designed pinned hinge joints. It was a real challenge understanding how to print a 0.84 mm hole accurately for the pin. I finally came up with a workable approach last weekend.


At this point I know how to do the joints and now face the problem of securing the latex band that contracts the finger.






It is nice having a little time to work on the project after the loss of last Fall and much of the winter to the demands of my day job.




1 comment:

  1. Hi Forest. I mentioned in the comments last year that I was thinking along similar lines. Well things have gotten a little out of hand since then! Anyway I thought you might be interested in looking at my site, since I finally got around to updating it.
    http://anthromod.com/blog/

    ReplyDelete