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Migrating our Designs to FreeCAD

A project log for OpenBionics Affordable Prosthetic Hands

Affordable, light-weight, anthropomorphic prosthetic hands, using a novel selectively-lockable differential mechanism.

openbionicsOpenBionics • 09/21/2015 at 19:29•4 Comments

Until now our designs were prepared in Solidworks 2014 (Dassault Systems). Since Solidworks is not an open-source software and a lot of people do not have access to a Solidworks license, we decided to start migrating our designs to an open-source alternative and more precisely to FreeCAD.

We have already designed 2 versions in Solidworks 2014. The first version was fabricated using acrylic (Plexiglas) in a laser cutter as we mentioned in a previous log. You can find the appropriate files here.

The second version was fabricated using ABS in a 3D Printer as we mentioned in a previous log. You can find the appropriate files here.

More details can be found in our GitHub repository:

OpenBionics GitHub Repository | Prosthetic | FreeCAD Files
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Electronic Breakout Board for Prosthetic Hand

09/21/2015 at 16:54 • 0 comments
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Prosthetic Hand in FreeCAD: Palm and Tendon Routing

10/24/2015 at 16:06 • 0 comments

Discussions

zakqwy wrote 10/12/2015 at 19:56 • point

I'm vaguely trying to migrate over to Freecad for similar reasons, at least for new projects. Have you had decent luck with the platform? I'm a bit concerned about the lack of extensive constraint options, and the limited assembly capability--any issues there?

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OpenBionics wrote 10/12/2015 at 20:01 • point

Hi there! We had a lot of issues, we are still trying to migrate all the files. Agis is mainly involved with this. I will send him an email now and he will get back to you.

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zakqwy wrote 10/12/2015 at 20:10 • point

Thanks! No rush--more idle curiosity than anything. I'd love to go full-open-source on my projects; I can already do that on the electronics side thanks to KiCad and various Linux tools, but hardware design is a tougher nut to crack.

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Agis Zisimatos wrote 10/13/2015 at 21:24 • point

Hey, in satnogs project (https://hackaday.io/project/1340-satnogs-global-network-of-ground-stations) they (and me) are designing all the parts and assembly in freecad. So, we decided to design the prosthetic hand in freecad, in order to use open source tools. Also you can see this guy ( https://www.youtube.com/user/cad1919/videos), he designs everything with freecad !!! One major issue is, when we change constrains in one sketch, the previous sketches lose some constrains. But this happens some times.

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