You3dit is Working to Help Crowdsource 3D Design and Printing (Video)

Video You3dit is Working to Help Crowdsource 3D Design and Printing (Video) 12

Posted by Roblimo on Monday July 27, 2015 @04:44PM from the if-you-can-make-it-here-you-can-make-it-anywhere dept.

Video no longer available.

The example you3dit (You 3D It) person Chris McCoy uses in this video is a prosthetic hand they wanted to make because one of their people lost fingers in a construction accident. Instead of drawing up plans for a new hand, they searched online -- and found enablingthefuture.org, which is all about making 3-D printed prosthetic hands. Using a predesigned hand was obviously much simpler than starting from scratch, and was totally in line with the Open Source "Why reinvent the wheel?" philosophy.

So you3dit helps make 3-D printed items of one sort or another, and can either print them for you at their place or help you find someone local to help with the printing, assuming you can't do it yourself. As you might expect, they did a Kickstarter project. It was for a product called Raver Rings. Unlike many Kickstarter projects we mention on Slashdot, this one didn't fly. In fact, it only got $2,275 in pledges against a $10,000 goal. No matter. There are many other useful things the you3dit community can make -- or help you make -- without Kickstarter.

Tim Lord for Slashdot: Chris, we’re standing at your booth, and you’ve got a prosthetic hand here.

Chris: That’s right.

Slashdot: Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this?

Chris: Yeah. So, this is a really cool project, by enablingthefuture.org and what they do is, they have a platform that has a lot of digital design files that are very customizable for the patient and users. And basically we have a member at the tech shop in San Francisco who unfortunately lost their fingers in a contracting accident and we kind of said, hey, what can we do together, 3D in the tech shop to help give this guy a hand and literally a hand and so we started the conversation, it forced me to start focusing on, you know, where can I get a 3D printable hand and I found enablingthefuture.org.

And so, I said, great, I mean, it saves a lot of design work and effort and it’s for a great cause and so I downloaded it and then I 3D printed it on a $600 printable simple metal using really high grade Cubicity and Voltivo filament. And so I was just super thankful that we were able to produce something on such a low cost machine, and then talking to the gentleman who needs the hand, I mean, he literally started crying, he was like, I could hear it on the phone, he’s like I can’t believe we are doing this. This is so exciting for me.

So that was like – I’ll tell you the truth, I make a lot of widgets and stuff on a 3D printer, but that was a – oh my gosh, this is like a – this is why I’m doing this kind of moment and this is why I like 3D printers, it’s so amazing, it’s because they can enable some of these things. And this is like where, I realize that my scope of design is limited, so I need people that have these new needs that allow me to bring amazing technologies and applications to life.

So, that’s enabling the future, you may have heard that Google got involved and obviously, with the investment that Google has put into this, you know, I think that’s going to make a huge impact and really help people change their dysfunctional hands into really cool 3D printable prosthetics where you can a swap out a finger for an LED light or a screwdriver, who knows, maybe the Slashdot community will come up with something really clever like what would you swap your finger out for, you know.

Slashdot: Speaking of that swapping out, you have some ideas on that front, talk about what you’re thinking about actually looking at these pieces?

Chris: Yeah. So, couple of things. So, like I said the light or the screwdriver, I mean, you could have, I mean, knife blades. I’m an engineer, right? So I always wanted like some sort of tool, maybe a set of Allen wrenches, maybe things you would find to fix your bike. But the other thing really that I think is really cool about these different pieces is that we actually are using them as a quality check for the manufacturers, at least the 3D printing manufacturers in our network to see how well they 3D print parts and then what we do with all the 3D printable parts that they sent us at our headquarters, we then evaluate them and then we assemble hands with them. So we like to think that we are not just asking people to send us a bunch of 3D printed plastic that we can use, I mean, if we can go and assemble that together and make someone a hand, that would be fantastic. It might look multi-colored and kind of crazy looking at the end of the day, but I think somebody would just rather have the functionality of a hand.

But yeah, it’s been a really cool project, you can even see like this is the ninjaflex style, or Flexifill 3D printer filament which actually is really tricky to print with. So we had some of it, so used that as the sort of return mechanism for these fingers. You can see your standard fishing line back here, and I think it’s about let’s see, well, probably about 12 to 15 parts in total. These bigger pieces take a little bit longer to print, maybe up to six or seven hours, but nevertheless like with few hours on the machine and one visit to Ace Hardware or Home Depot, something, you can hack this all together.

So the question comes up how much is this hand actually cost to produce and it’s a good question and frankly most 3D printer filament that you get on the market today for $50 for like a roll, like a kilogram worth of filament, so it’s about, what is that, $0.05 a gram, and so this weighs maybe about 100 grams, so what is that? $5 to print this hand, then you figure the energy cost of running a 3D printer, pretty much negligible, maybe like 100 watts when they are running. And then it’s really the design, the time that it takes to print and if you have a failure or something, and obviously the cost of ownership of the machine, but again for a $600 machine you get that once, you could probably print, I don’t know, probably 100 of these hands before you have to replace the machine itself.

So I’m just going to say it’s under $10 to $12 to 3D print this entire hand. There are some companies that offer these really nice kits which are a bit more, but they give you all the hardware and these straps to sort of strap it to your hand and these nice little rubberized fingers here that allow people to sort of grip when they’re finally all assembled. So this cost a little bit more, I think like $40 or $50 and the name escapes me, but nevertheless definitely not that expensive to print, and I think the social benefits and the tugging of the heart strings kind of benefit well outweighs the cost.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.