The assignments for this week are:

Level BASIC: Pneumatic wrist brace

Level Intermediate: Soft Gripper

Level Advanced : Pneumatic, digitally controlled system

We started with the pneumatic wrist brace, after getting all the materials

First of all I downloaded the design to cut on the vynil cutter, the material I used was an urethane.

I cut the 2 mirrored pieces . Then I cut a piece of baking paper a little bit smaller than the urethane one. This will avoid the 2 urethane pieces stick to each others.

Then I did iron the 2 pieces with a protection sheet to avoid the urethane sticks to the iron.

The second step consists on putting air into the 2 sealed sheets:

To avoid the air goes out, I made a backflow valve (steps 3,4,5) and works nicely.

As we couldn’t get the silicon at time to make the soft gripper, I did experiment a bit more with the vinyl-inflatable. I decided to design a new form, like a worm and see how it moves as it swells.

And finally did put air inside

You can see here an animated GIF