e-NABLE 2.0 hand

For the last couple of weeks, several of e-NABLE's leading designers have been working hard to develop an entirely new version of the e-NABLE Hand, incorporating all of our lessons learned so far. There are some exciting features incorporated, and we're looking forward to having the e_NABLE community help us with testing and providing feedback.

We achieved a big milestone this week, creating a fully assembled and working version of the new design, after just two weeks of development (see photo). This week, Ivan Owen is going to be producing three of these new devices, which will then be tested on three young recipients this coming weekend. After we get feedback from Ivan's testing and incorporate any fixes needed, we'll be releasing this new design to the e-NABLE community for testing and further feedback. 

This new version is being developed as a parametric design in Autodesk Fusion. That means you'll be free to make changes or entire remixes of the design if you'd like once it's released. 

Our goal is to do the official launch of this new design during the September 28 John's Hopkins conference, so everyone's help in testing before then will be greatly appreciated. 

The picture of the hand above along with the text has just been posted on the e-NABLE Google+ group. It's the e-NABLE 2.0 Hand. I have been working with Ivan Owen, Peter Binkley, Andreas Bastian, Jon Schull, Peregrine Hawthorn, and Jeremy Simon on the development of this official e_NABLE hand. I have been chartered with designing the gauntlet, tensioning mechanism, and hinge snap pins. It has been really great to work with this group. Within just a week or two we have been able to develop something that fits together and functions. With Ivan designing the fingers and Peter designing the palm, we are able to share our designs via Autodesk Fusion 360, as well as by email. We meet Sunday and Wednesday nights via Google Hangouts so we can discuss issues with components and share our printed experiments. Tonight was the first meeting where we were able to witness the fruits of our labors as Jeremy showed an assembled version of the parts that we designed as a group. Andreas and Ivan will now work on getting everything into parametric files via Fusion 360 software. Our thoughts have been around building a robust hand that can be printed on a variety of 3D printers with no support or raft, thinking about the possibility of printing the hand in remote locations, and assembling with little to no tools or hardware. I am sure we will have some things that need to be fine tuned but I for one am excited to see a hand with no hardware that utilizes all 3D printed parts. Hopefully, I can begin to test some prints and possibly get some hands out to some of the children that we have already made hands for, so they can test drive this new design.