14 DAY TRIAL // Prosthetic hands continue to be one of the most popular applications of 3D printing, thanks to costing a thousandth of the standard price while not just matching, but besting normal prosthetics in usability. In fact, a new realm of custom-designed prosthetics has opened.
As if to prove the benefits of such products, a man named Pat Starace has created a prosthetic hand that looks like the glove of the Iron Man costume.
Although saying it looks like that glove doesn't quite contain the whole truth. The prosthetic Iron Man hand actually has that round repulsor on the palm too, and it shines when you deploy it.
All you need to do is pull the palm upwards and back and voila! The lights will engage and start spinning until you have make-believe thrust.
The Iron Man prosthetic hand
Obviously, the hand / glove doesn't really possess the technologies in the movie or comics, but it would do great as a prop on a film set.
Granted, while the body of the hand can be 3D printed easily enough, you'll have to buy all the other parts separately. You won't have to look too far at least.
The prosthetic can incorporate RGB LEDs to mimic the shine of the hand repulsor, a Lipo battery, a Lipo charger, low power Bluetooth, sensors, microcontrollers, wireless devices, accelerometers, even smart watches.
More importantly, it boasts an Arduino microcontroller that allows it to automatically engage certain functions depending on the position of the wrist and fingers.
For example, getting the palm to move up and backwards will activate the LED-based “repulsor” and the gyroscope that will make everything spin fast enough for the laser and whatever LEDs you installed on the edge to mold together into a single beam. You can even program animated patterns for the hand to cycle through.
Starace designed the hand from the ground up
Other prosthetics we've seen used open-source designs already available publicly, but Starace didn't do that. Instead, he personally invented every component, based on the inspiration he got from the Iron Man franchise. He used MAYA to model the hand after examining photographs found on the Internet.
It took 48 hours to print everything from ABS plastic on his Deezemaker Bukobot. He had to spend a lot of time removing support material and polishing the results though.
Miraculously, after installing all the electromechanical components, the hand worked exactly as he hoped. Those over 20 years of experience in animatronics came in handy. There doesn't seem to be an online instruction / model set for it yet though.
