Device and Unicorns

The challenge is one of the most difficult ones: to create a device that can adapt to a child who has a particular problem, an agenesis of four fingers of the hand with only the residual thumb.

The standard e-Nable devices are not useful in this case because they do not contemplate this possibility, the other opensource solutions available are not adequate because morphologically not compatible with the child's hand, something new, unique and specific is needed. for the little girl, we need all of our skills to be able to create the device to give to the little one.

The modification of the 3D model turned out to be extremely complex due to a series of technical issues, but thanks to the help of the friends of 4DoItaly we were able to obtain what appears to be a good result.

Having prepared the 3D model, we moved on to customization to make it unique and pleasant for the child, even here the request was "special", because each recipient of our devices is special.

His desire was to have a pink device with a unicorn on the palm, so we immediately got to work to make it happen, even here after a few weeks of testing and countless attempts we ask our friends for help who, thanks to their proven experience, show us the way on how to work with meshes.

https://youtu.be/NhpZyQKiSrM

The rest of the work is the work of Alessandro, our most tireless of volunteers, he is good, he is technically very well prepared and is always ready to contribute to any project.

Together we worked together to fine-tune the final model with the 3D components that would make up the final device.

Once the design was finished, we moved on to printing, here thanks to Palette, the device we bought with the donations arrived at e-Nable Italia, we thought we would have an easy life and make a fantastic multi-color print, but nothing is taken for granted and nothing is simple, even here tests and trials (each print took from 6 to 14/20 hours) to no end, because the device is very powerful but using it requires a great knowledge of an infinite number of configuration parameters in generating the file for the printer and a meticulous control of every detail.

Hours, days of tests and trials, spools of filaments and hours and hours (literally nights) of work to develop profiles and an adequate printing procedure.

To arrive at a test device that is almost acceptable, to date we may have worked for over 150 hours on the device, but there is still work to be done: the fitting is not accurate and the unicorn just doesn't want to be printed. properly with Palette ...

The next steps:

1. modify the printer to operate in direct drive mode and improve control with color printing
2. wait for the arrival of the last gift they generously gave us, a 3D scanner to scan the hand and perfectly calibrate the size of the print

Because we don't stop until we see the unicorn fly!