The 3D assist group is made up of students and staff from the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland. We were originally called e-NABLE Tallaght but changed the name so as not to cause confusion with the ENABLE Ireland organisation !!
We fundraise to finance the manufacture of the devices and we make them in our spare time. All of the devices we make are FREE so don't worry about cost etc.
The hand and arm devices are not full blown medical prosthetics which for example, do not have the ability to control individual finger movements and are not capable of bearing the weight of a child. (They can not provide the ability to use the monkey bars at school.) but they can grasp water bottles etc.
We use "open source" designs and, then if necessary, tweak and adjust them to suit our recipients. I've listed the designs etc at the end of this page as they're long !!
This design has worked out really well and has opened up a lot of opportunities for us to help our recipients.
We have also designed devices from scratch for specific applications such as custom wheelchair joysticks, custom I-pad stylus etc. So if you find something on the web that you believe can be 3D printed and that may help you let us know and we may be able to print it for you.
Designs we've used:
Most all of the designs we’ve used have originated
at http://enablingthefuture.org/ or http://www.thingiverse.com/
For the hands we started to use the Raptor Reloaded hand http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:596966
but have recently started to use the Phoenix hand design http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1453190
More recently we've been using the UnLimbited arm design.
The UnLimbited arm is a brilliant design and has been great for us as it has meant we can make arms for people who we would have struggled to help before.
We've used the UnLimbited Arm version 1.7 although there is a new version found at http://www.teamunlimbited.org/the-unlimbited-arm-20-alfie-edition-current/ which we are looking forward to using.
We usually modify the open source STL files using CAD packages or in most cases have used Tinkercad for this (it’s brilliant) https://www.tinkercad.com/ and https://hub.e-nable.org/dashboard
