In preparation for the upcoming conference “Prosthetists Meet Printers” e-NABLE Conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital on September 28th, the e-NABLE community are joining together to print a series of “Light Show Hand!” prosthetics. They are already (as of Wednesday) about half way done, and they could use more help!
Read more about the project on the e-NABLINGtheFuture.org website. If you have a 3D Printer, sign up to chip in. Also, checkout the lifestream of printing below to watch the action!
One of our e-NABLE volunteers, Debbie Leung, is continuously reminding us that the possibilities are endless when it comes to combining our imaginations with 3D printing.
We asked her how these hands work and she writes: “The light show hand has a switch. All the RGB LED lights emit red, yellow, green, blue, magenta, cyan and white color in a sequence repeatedly. You switch the other side and the color sensor turns on and to detect red, green and blue by pushing against the side of the palm where color sensing components are located.”
This hand includes 3 components:
- Physical Design – Modifications on the palm with two little add on designs (Iron Man Arc Light and the e-NABLE heart hand shake logo), extra designs to put the components for the color sensor and battery holder, an extra hole on each finger and four extra holes on the palm were created, which allows each RGB with 4 wires to go in each finger and the palm.
- Two Adruino programs that run RGB LED lights in two ways.
- Electronics – Photoresistor, RGB LED Lights, resistors, a button, a switch, two Attiny85 parts and four button cell batteries.
e-NABLING The Future
Over the past year, the e-NABLE Google+ community has grown from 70ish people who had 3D printers and offered to make parts for those who needed hands created…to a global “Village” of nearly 1700 individuals who have come together to share their creativity, their ideas, their passions and their talents to help make 3D printed prosthetics for children and adults in need.
While we continue to strive to make low cost and functional devices to share with the world …we are also discovering the power of our imaginations as we find ourselves remembering that these devices can be anything we want them to be…we do not have to be limited to the idea that they must look like “real” hands…they can become whatever it is that makes us feel beautiful and special.
- We can be super heroes.
- We can have 6 fingers.
- We can have hands at the end of our elbows.
- We can have card holders instead of fingertips.
- We can have light shows living in our fingertips…
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!