Hi! Week four felt like it zoomed by as I really tried to soak up and enjoy the chaos of a very prototyping heavy week. Our main goals this week were to continue iterating on the kinetic hand model with some new changes as well as getting more organized and methodical with our changes. This week, we really learned how important it was to manage and tackle our preconceived notions about the solution and brainstorm more out of the box.

This week, we decided to add some more finalizing edits to the thumb position, to better adjust the thumb hinge hole where the thumb lies flat along the palm. This was one of the main changes my colleague JJ and I worked on which helped us dramatically gain more confidence in our CAD and modeling skills. Since we had to work to modify a pre-existing piece, we learned a lot about removing existing features, and creating new precise features that are properly scaled. Specifically we learned how to remove the previous hinge joint on the thumb and angle it in a new direction perpendicular to the base. It was tough yet valuable to learn how to use constraints, projections, and offset planes to create a new centered, perpendicular slot. There were many special considerations such as ensuring that existing hinges would still fit into the slot, a feat requiring precision and attention to detail.

Based on our last meeting with Eric, we also identified the need to add wrist support, to prevent his wrist from snapping backwards upon impact with the ball. After going through brainstorming and evaluating our solutions with a pugh scoring matrix, we determined adding triangular cushioning wrist hinges between the palm and the gauntlet would be the best mechanism. After some Fushion360, we were able to generate a simple design that worked fairly effectively with some qualitative testing. We plan to do some more quantitative testing in the future with force to prove that it takes more force to push the wrist backwards with the supports.

This quick iteration and success however did not continue on to all of the modifications we made this week. Rather, we may have become overconfident and skimped on the process of fully evaluating our solutions before making changes. Another change we planned to make this week was to strengthen the fingers and remove the contraction abilities, a feature we found unnecessary for basketball. We assumed that this could be easily done by disconnecting the tensioners from the gauntlet and tying them off at the bottom of the palm. After some minimal brainstorming, we low-fidelity prototyped some mechanisms by drilling holes in the palm. However, we were unsure how much this method actually adds to the stability and strength of the finger and that we may have over engineered a solution that could have been simpler. After more extensive brainstorming, we have a better solution, reinforced hinges, that we are going to prototype next week. Despite having wasted some time in our overeagerness to start prototyping, this did reinforce the value of low fidelity prototyping for us.