Nt1310 Unit 8 Final Project

The design idea we had was modified several times. Initially the fingers that were constructed for the hand seemed to work and look fine in our Solidworks assembly. We did not want the fingers to be too large as the girl were were designing the hand for is only seven years old. However, after printing them, we quickly realized that they were far too small to be able to exert the force to grasp a water bottle. Furthermore, because they were so small, it was difficult for the 3D printer to print out the finger because the walls were so thin. This also meant that it was extremely difficult to get support material out, especially without damaging the finger. We resigned the fingers to be longer, and a bit thicker. We made sure to add thickness …show more content…
Again, on the Solidworks assembly the thumb seemed to work fine. However, after printing and assembling it on the hand, we realized that the thumb wrapped around the bottle in a way that made it barely have contact with the bottle. The angle of the bend was too small. It seemed as though it would not be able to have a good grip on the bottle for it to be able to support picking the bottle up. We redesigned the thumb so that it would have a larger angle, however, after printing this out, we realized that when pulling down on the fishing line, the thumb would not bend down like we wanted it to. In our final design, we extended the thumb length and increased the angle slightly so that it would be able to both bend down, and increase the amount of contact it had on the …show more content…
Although the shield functions fine, there is a comfort issue. The shield we initially designed was one long piece, however, the 3D printers we had were not large enough to print such a large piece. Thus, we accommodated to that by printing splitting the shield in half. However, in order for one to be able to be attached to the other, we had to make the latter piece larger so that the side with the motor housing could fit within in and be screwed together. In the future, we would need to make the piece shorter. Also, since we had very small mold of only the girl’s hand, it was difficult to estimate the length, width and curvature the arm shield needed to