Idea: Throughout 5 weeks Henry and I have worked rigorously on modifying the Snap-Together Robohand, designed to be a cheap 3D printable prosthetic for children. Our idea originated from our love of baseball. While understanding the limitations these children had, we came up with a design to open and close a baseball glove with the movement of your wrist.

Design: We used a 3D modeling software called Rhinoceros to redesign all the pieces we needed to. Our first step was to look at all of the pieces of the hand. We realized that only half of it needed to change in order for it to make the motion we wanted. We started sketching out everything that needed to change and then designed the original pieces that we were going to change in rhino. After that was done, we started the modifying process. This included angleing and extending pieces, as well as creating completley new fingers that would be in different areas of the hand. After designing and printing all the new pieces, we ran into several problems and went back into Rhino to fix them. We had to create larger holes in the fingers for the elastic and wires to run through and we cleaned up some of our designs. Running into even more problems, Henry and I as well as another group met together and decided on a few key points in making our hands sleeker and more efficient. We went into another 3D software program called Inventor. This allowed us to join many of the pieces, cutting down on the total amount we had to print in half. Inventor gave us the ability to put all of our pieces together and see the movement that would happen when it was printed. Although we are still working out some details and issues that need some cleaning up, we have a prototype that looks leaps and bounds better than our very first. We intend on continuing our work on the Baseball Prosthetic after the end of NuVu. Our overall goal is to have our hand available on Thingiverse, a huge open source 3D printing community. This will allow anyone with acess to a 3D printer to make our hand and use it. We are very proud of the work we did for this project and hope that this inspires more people to get into prosthetics and 3D modeling.

The Snap-Together Robohand was 3D modeled and open sourced to give people a cheap and easy way to obtain a prosthetic. Normal prosthetics can cost in the tens of thoasands of dollars. Although the original Robohand can close its fingers, it doesn't allow the user to do much else besides picking larger objects up. That's why the DIY Prosthetic  In the DIY Prosthetic studio, we were given the Snap-Together Robohand as a model and were told to modify it into a hand with a specific use. The Baseball Prosthetic uses a claw like closing motion which is needed to shut the glove. Moving the wrist up and down will open and close the glove.