[Easton's] animatronic hand gets 3D printed upgrade

posted Aug 29th 2011 1:14pm by Mike Szczys
filed under: robots hacks

[Easton] as been working with [Jeremy Blum] to come up with the newest version of his animatronic hand. You may remember seeing [Easton's] first animatronic hand, with which he won his regional science fair and made a trip to nations. Since then he’s been working on improvements, and with access to [Jeremy's] Makerbot he harnessed the power of open source design to make his own printed hand, extending a different Thingiverse project.

He’s still using the original sensor glove as a controller. It sends commands to the Arduino controlling the arm via an Xbee module. From there, five servos inside a fiberglass forearm move each finger and the thumb. The video clip after the break gives [Easton] a chance to show off all of the new design features, and finishes with a demonstration of the hand grasping different objects. We had a chance to chat with him briefly. He’s got big goals for himself, aiming to design a prosthetic arm for under $1000. That’s not a career goal… he’d like to get it done this year.

Comments [10]

tagged: arduino, makerbot, prosthetics, science fair

10 Responses to [Easton's] animatronic hand gets 3D printed upgrade

Jeremy Blum says:

August 29, 2011 at 1:16 pm

Go Easton! This is awesome :)

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UltimateJim says:

August 29, 2011 at 1:35 pm

Awesome!

Just… make sure to keep it human controlled…

Interfacing it with an amputee seems like the next step…

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Zee says:

August 29, 2011 at 1:43 pm

Why not 3D print the enclosure too instead of fiberglass?

It works really well and smoother than I expected he should deff collaborate with the guy who made the original printable hand.

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Daid says:

August 29, 2011 at 3:28 pm

@Zee: The enclosure is larger then most 3D printers can handle.

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sariel says:

August 29, 2011 at 3:30 pm

looks cool. it also looks like something straight out of Minecraft. I doubt it would stand up to a block of dirt or wood. ^_^

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Vampyredh says:

August 29, 2011 at 4:12 pm

I love it he used a 3d printer and pepakura to build an animitronic hand

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Max says:

August 29, 2011 at 10:53 pm

Nice work.
What’s that beeping/crickets noise in the background?

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Victor says:

August 30, 2011 at 4:43 am

Amazing. Hope this project ends up giving people that really needs this things a go. Those weird functional prosthetics are ridiculously expensive. This might not look as natural as those, but its probably cheaper. Now, to interface the thing with forearms!

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buzzles says:

August 30, 2011 at 9:35 am

Interesting progress on this project, still plenty of room for refinining.

Initial steps would be rounding off all the finger parts and removing excessive material in order to get the weight down, which makes life easier for the servos. It’ll look better as well.

A while back I actually did some design sketches about making a hand after I saw Easton’s first video, it’s a project I plan on doing at some point.

I’m more focused on freedom of movement though and my design has 3 servos for each finger. One for the main part of the finger, connected to the tip for flexing, the other two for the knuckle by the palm, said knuckle will probably be a 2-axis gimble, universal joint or similar 2 axis joint. Should allow for much greater control when flexing, allowing for better claw shapes to be made and also letting you expand the span of the hand.

It’ll be at least 15 servos for a hand, 17 including the wrist movements (up/down and left/right), possibly more if I add rotation to the hand/wrist.

Can you tell I’ve given it some thought? :)

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Monty Werthington says:

August 30, 2011 at 1:20 pm

nice project there, and if he can make a prosthetic arm for such a low cost just imagine how many people would benefit from this. Also just imagine if the NHS was able to make these on demand to exact dimensions without having to send off to the workshops, lets just wait and see guys.

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