the quest for robots

I guess pictures are worth a thousand words for this. I am looking at this page in the Inmoov website to download and assemble the parts. initial printing of parts: shown above are some of the forearm parts and some palm parts. the rest of the palm with some of the fingers, along with the forearm part glued together. thankfully, these parts are designed to be printed in smaller parts and put together, which makes it possible to this to be printed with a small 3D printer like mine, which only allows for only 12cm x 12cm x 12cm (~5 inch x 5 inch x 5 inch) in print size. some parts had to be realigned in the model-slicing software in order to have it fit in the print boundary. all the printing done so far. you can see the inside of the forearm now has a servo bed, with more things needed to be printed and attached to the inside. I will need to get screws to attach them. currently, the only big part missing the the last wrist part, which I am considering printing wit

the fingers are moved using wires and tension. each finger is looped through with a wire/string/line in a top-bottom fashion. when the top wire is loosened/bottom wire is tightened, the finger curls in its joints, resulting in a "bent finger".  you don't have precise control of each joint movement, but it is simple enough to be controlled by a single actuator (in this case a servo).  here is me just using my own hands as an actuator: here it is hooked up to as servo and controlled by a potentiometer: the movement is not smooth because 1) it's controlled by a potentiometer that I am controlling, as seen in the background, and I was unable to move it all the way with one smooth finer motion. 2) the tension in the line was not entirely tight. I need to learn how to tie these well. now I have a get a bunch of servos.  much credit and thanks to Inmoov once again.

well, I'm back. "back with a 3d printer" kind of back. took a week off earlier this month for a stay-cation, and during this time of peace, I decided it was the right time to get my hands on one. behold, the Monoprice Select Mini . thoughts so far: - very inexpensive for today's standards (got it for $200) - produces great prints - very non-proprietary this review convinced me in the end that this printer is the one. by the way, the above picture shows the 3d printer with the "sample filament," which I soon realized was way, way too little to do anything. I honestly didn't know what I should do with it at first, trying to find 3D models to print in the internet, until I stumbled into this . an open-source, 3D-printable robot. it's always been a dream of sorts for me to build a controllable hand. it was my intention to build something like that during one of my college projects , but it ended up being something else (software)