Project 2 : Making an animatronic Hand
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Description    For my second project, I decided to make an animatronic hand. It works by pulling the string connected to each of the "fingers." This sort of hand could come in handy (no pun intended) for many different reasons. In movies and Halloween haunted houses, this could be a special effect prop. It could also be used in those daily occurrences when you just do not want to shake hands with that coworker who never washes their hands after going to the bathroom. Or just to get back at that friend who played a prank on you last week. Theoretical Grounding    After discussing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in class and talking about human creations, I became interested in differences between human artificially made intelligences that somehow resemble human parts and human beings and humans themselves. In addition, the video we saw in class with a disconnected dog head that was kept alive gave me the inspiration for this project. This is where television helped me come up with my idea because I saw a hand device used in the show "Pushing Daisies" for the main character to pet his dog. After finding instructions online for how to make a simple (and non-electronic) animatronic hand, I knew I had my project. How It was Made    I bought some tubing and string at Home Depot. I then used the tubing as each of the fingers and cut slits where the joints of each finger would be. Then, I thread the string through each piece of tubing and placed the tubing in similar positions to where it would be if it were a real human hand. I then connected a hanger to the bottom of the hand to grip while pulling each of the strings. I modeled the animatronic hand off of my own hand. My Thoughts Of course there were still many complications with this project (but really when are there not?). I spent several hours and made many trips to Home Depot looking for the right type of tubing that had just the right amount of flex without being too flexible or too stiff so that it could somewhat reasonably imitate the motion of a hand. Also, the longer I made the handle for the hand, the heavier the whole contraption got and the harder it was to control. I think my project could have turned out better than it did. For example, I did not realize how complicated and hard it would be to actually use the animatronic hand in some sort of functioning manner. While I could pick things up with it, it took a lot of practice. In addition, I should have spent more time developing my presentation, perhaps making up a back story or something along those lines. I will hopefully successfully incorporate what I learned from this project into my final project to create a more complete and well-rounded project.