The Open Hand Project will make prothetic robot hands affordable for everyone. Blender plays an important role.
The aim of the Open Hand Project is to make robotic prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees.Leading prosthetics can cost up to $100,000. By using emerging technologies like 3D printing, we can cut that down to under $1000. That’s two orders of magnitude cheaper, and means that these devices can reach a far broader audience!
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The bulk of the Dextrus hand will be 3D printed in plastic. There are a variety of software packages available for 3D modelling, Solidworks is arguably the best for engineering design, however I’ll be using Blender for my designs because it’s free. Blender is a highly capable 3D modelling software generally used by artists and animators rather than designers, but can be applied to engineering designs as well.
11 Comments
A very noble cause. ladies and gentlemen give them a hand!
You are making the world a better place.
Great job!
To the open hand project
Another free cad package you might consider could be freecad it is ok but needs alot of work in and of its self . a thought occured to me the other day when free cad came up on here , maybe Ton and the devs could talk to the free cad devs and help out (i know time and devotion to blender development is important)
Maybe the blender foundation could take their package and call it blendgineer??
Freecad has alot going for it but requires alot of tweaking to make it really usable
It doesn't have as yet an assembly modual(its in development but is buggy)
some thoughts for people to cogitate on
"Maybe the blender foundation could take their package and call it blendgineer??" -- what would it change, exactly? :)
Well hopefully development time would be sped up , cycles renderer would become maybe the default renderer instead of povray . and hopefully the developers of freecad would get more support both from the community and from other developers who have more experience (??) hunting bugs and so forth .
To my eye these are 2 different packages (blender for artists and freecad for engineers) both built on python so the added blender devs eyeballs on freecads code would be a big bonus for freecad(i dont know how many devs are working on freecad)
I dont want to take away devs from blender but their coding experince would help freecad alot
Just my 10 cents worth:)
One thing you need to know about FreeCAD is that it is heavily dependent on OpenCascade. Considering that, the use of Python is a bit of a minor detail.
Ahh so its the opencascade modeling kernel manipulated by the python programming language correct? So the UI is python based?
So what "if" the python code side of freecad is buggy, having a new set of eyes on it would help, especially the blender developers with their vast experience with python. Again i dont know how many devs are working on Freecad and i have no desire to take development time away from blender either . I think these 2 packages are complementary not rivals to each other
Most problems are actually coming from OpenCascade. And before you ask, no, it's not easy to switch to a different kernel (and there is no direct substitution).
Verry noble, i wonder since printing is pretty cheap, what drives up the current cost ?
Is it software or electronics ?, maybe join arduino forum to get help with electronics and software.
It is nice project.. awesome.. you can help people with that hand or foot and also can make money with mass production. The hand is good if with voice controller too.
You are True Hero Blender..