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Hand and Enclosure 3D Printing

A project log for Helping H.A.N.D.S.

We are Electrical Engineering students who built and programmed a robotic hand to translate spoken language into ASL fingerspelling.

nick-allisonNick Allison 05/25/2023 at 17:390 Comments

The robotic hand and primary enclosure for the Helping H.A.N.D.S. project are all 3D printed. There is a 3D-printed base at the bottom of the hand, which contains the servo connectors and the servo driver. Above the enclosure is the 3D-printed hand. The palm of the hand contains the servos used to control the movement of the fingers and thumb. Overlaid on top of the servo motors is a piece used to route tendons used to actuate the fingers. Finally, the fingers are connected to the top of the palm.

All the 3D printed parts used in our design are from the open-source Robot Nano Hand project. We printed the parts at the makerspaces at our university and on personal 3D printers using PLA filament. The inner palm piece had to be reprinted due to poor print quality the first time.

Due to printing the parts on multiple printers, there were some scaling issues. The servo motors did not initially fit inside the palm of the hand. As well, the inner palm piece did not align with the servos in the hand and needed to be cut. Even when pieces were printed to the correct scale, they still needed to be sanded to ensure smooth operation. Our team spent a combined 30+ hours sanding parts for this project. To reduce the amount of time spent sanding if we were to redo this project, we would slightly scale up all the prints to ensure the servo motors fit inside the palm.

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