Hello from Iowa!

[CaptainMerica]

Greetings all,

I guess for starters I'll say that I have read these forums a ton for advice and info, and I just figured it was time to get in on the action.

I am a tooling designer from Iowa, born and raised the second son of two engineers. Growing up my family was involved with battlebots (circa 2000). And we were pretty darn good at it
My dad retired from Deere of 35 years as a product engineer and is now a professor at Iowa State. We also have a farm in northern Minnesota (my dads home-area) where we farm 1,300 acres, give or take.

My older brother and I have a rostock max v2 that is beyond comparison better than the davinci 1.0 we got a year or so ago to fiddle around with. We have spent a lot of our free time this last 6 months designing and prototyping an open source bionic hand for our friend Taylor Morris, an ex Navy EOD tech that lost all 4 limbs in an explosion a few years ago. My brother began talking with him as they are both involved with a MakerSpace that is being established in the area, and got on topic about his prosthetic arm and how Taylor wished it had this or that feature. And we have evolved that idea so far that now we have something truely amazing. (more on that in the future )

We mostly print abs and flexable filaments, and just recently ordered a chimera hot end as well as the trick laser 325mm carbon fiber arms, amongst other doodads, to hopefully really crank up the accuracy on our prints. Currently working on designing a platform to hold the chimera hot end in a way that moves the nozzle closer to the platform to reduce any tolerance build-up and provide different mounting and cooling options.

Looking forward to great new info and people to meet!

[Eaglezsoar]

Greetings all,

I guess for starters I'll say that I have read these forums a ton for advice and info, and I just figured it was time to get in on the action.

I am a tooling designer from Iowa, born and raised the second son of two engineers. Growing up my family was involved with battlebots (circa 2000). And we were pretty darn good at it
My dad retired from Deere of 35 years as a product engineer and is now a professor at Iowa State. We also have a farm in northern Minnesota (my dads home-area) where we farm 1,300 acres, give or take.

My older brother and I have a rostock max v2 that is beyond comparison better than the davinci 1.0 we got a year or so ago to fiddle around with. We have spent a lot of our free time this last 6 months designing and prototyping an open source bionic hand for our friend Taylor Morris, an ex Navy EOD tech that lost all 4 limbs in an explosion a few years ago. My brother began talking with him as they are both involved with a MakerSpace that is being established in the area, and got on topic about his prosthetic arm and how Taylor wished it had this or that feature. And we have evolved that idea so far that now we have something truely amazing. (more on that in the future )

We mostly print abs and flexable filaments, and just recently ordered a chimera hot end as well as the trick laser 325mm carbon fiber arms, amongst other doodads, to hopefully really crank up the accuracy on our prints. Currently working on designing a platform to hold the chimera hot end in a way that moves the nozzle closer to the platform to reduce any tolerance build-up and provide different mounting and cooling options.

Looking forward to great new info and people to meet!

Hello and welcome to the Forum!
Thank you for purchasing the Rostock Max V2, perhaps you could send us a photo of it?
What you are doing to create an opensource bionic hand is great and I personally thank you for your kindness.
Many could benefit from your open source productions.
Again, welcome and happy printing!

[CaptainMerica]

I will post pictures of our max when we get it back, currently it is being used at a local company that aided us with laser scanning our friends current prosthetics to give us a cad model of what has already been created for a form-fitting socket for him, which gave us a HUGE starting place. They needed to 3D print a mold positive with some sort of wax filament (I would have to ask my brother on the specifics) that is used for investment casting, that they just could not get to print in their "fancy" printers, (again i would have to ask for specifics). I guess they were getting in a pretty tight spot, so my brother's friend asked if we could try printing it on our rostock and voila, first try, nailed it. So currently they are using it to print stuff they need. Kind of a "They scratched our back, so we're scratching theirs" sorta deal.

So in the meantime I have been looking into upgrades for our max, and trying to figure out what all we need to do, or should do, for mounting the chimera hot end that showed up the other day. My thought is that we could print the flexible filament endoskeleton, and use abs cores inside where the straight bones of the fingers are. This way the hand part of the bionic arm is a one piece printed object that would end up with a little more strength in certain areas.

I think my brother and I have agreed that we would like to end up with an aluminum or similar platform to hold the new hot end, much like the trick laser max metal platform. I would simply order it like I did the carbon fiber arms, but I'm afraid I have spent my budget for a while on parts, so far everything we have done on this bionic arm project is out of our own pocket and free time. And when it comes to parts like that, we both work at a tool and die shop, and my dad has a water-jet, and we have access to cnc everything, so it's kind of hard to not at least attempt to make one. "Those who can, make." or a built not bought sort of ideology I guess haha.

[CaptainMerica]

Oh, side note, as far as the open source part of our project, we're basically going for a fully printed, or purchased component arm, that uses an arduino for control, and is more utilitarian of a prosthesis. like I've said before, we're not trying to make the Ferrari of bionic arms, we're not even trying to make the corvette of them, we're trying to make the Chevy pickup of bionic arms, one that is cheap to manufacture, easy to work on, reliable and useful, and will be serviceable.