AMAZ Arm

Working with Hand Gif

Goals and Focus

This was a capstone project to develop a prototype and investigate materials selection for a 3d printed prosthetic arm for amputees, being quite broad this project has and will continue to turn in different directions depending on needs and interests.

Outputs

Capstone Paper

PDF

Progress Log

Generative Design2

Showing a full generative design workflow for the arm(now named the AMAZ Arm) using 3D Printed models. More pictures to come.

Generative Workflow1

State of the Arm 5/22/17 As the semester is over, all our do documentation is now available. I am continuing to work on the arm with a modern design and prototyping with a new 3D printer I built at home. I am focusing on generative design now as that is one of the strengths of additive manufacturing. I have named the arm the AMAZ arm standing for additive manufacturing in Arizona arm and will see what everyone thinks about it. As of now I am working alone but will probably soon be getting more capstone teams, and the original team is always here.

We did this presentation last week with Diana and got a ton of valuable feedback from industry. I will upload another video shortly as well as a brief on the suggestions we got and the changes we are making

Gif with Diana

State of the Arm 3/20/17 Yesterday we had our Sunday meeting. We are in the process of getting samples to finally test materials selection. As of now we are testing the following materials:

PETG

NylonX

Nylon W/ Kevlar

Onyx

Onyx W/ Carbon Fiber

We are doing tensile, Charpy, and 3-point bending tests to get a sense of the properties of the materials in the full range of loading conditions. I will post up a document detailing the selection and planning later today if I get the chance.

I have added a digital higher torque servo for the thumb but found when plugging both it and the main servo into the DC-DC buck converter it seemed to someone draw too much current for both motors to work. This also could have been because I was using a LiPo to power instead of just plugging into mains, I will try this next.

Working with Hand Gif

A true Prototype.

Hotwired cable path

Arm First Working Gif

State of the Arm 3/6/2017 Today we worked on improving the signal and code for the arm. We were able to get the activation threshold low with he proper placement of the sensor. We had trouble with the thumb servo as it seemed to keep breaking, likely a mixture of it being super cheap and the fact that we were feeding it 6 volts instead of 5. I will work on getting this working with a new servo tonight. I also want to work on improving the code, making it straightforward and efficient.