17_Team Time, Tuesday (event date: 22 SEP 15)

During team time we worked on revising our Project Launch Rough Draft, taking into consideration what we learned from Steve and Rusty (passive simple device much better than complicated active).

We spent a lot of our time trying to come up with type of mechanical joint that could be used for all the rotating joints in a passive device, a joint that would have a variable resistance to motion as well as locking without requiring the user to manually adjust every joint that they wanted to remain rigid.  Most of the designs that we came up with seemed to be too complicated to implement on such a small scale for each finger (Figure A & Figure B).

Figure A: Possible joint with locking teeth to become rigid when pressed together (center)

Figure B: Locking joint mechanism that uses interlocking teeth (center)

It seemed that the simplest design for a passive device would be one that would require a user to manually lock the device’s joints.  Trying to use electromagnets or some other electrical means to simultaneously lock all joints when the user wanted to maintain a particular hand position was getting overcomplicated.

One fellow mechanical engineer suggested a ball-pin joint (Figure B: right).  A pin inside a ball joint could be pressed in on the ball to vary resistance to motion.