3D Printed Blaster Does It With Compliant Components

The ease of integrating bendy parts into designs is one of 3D printing’s strengths. A great example of this is [uhltimate]’s six-shot blaster which integrates several compliant mechanis…

Flexures Make Robotic Fingers Simpler To Print

Designing an anthropomorphic robotic hand seems to make a lot of sense — right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. What works well in bone and sinew often …

Flexures Keep This Printed Displacement Sensor In Line

When the job at hand is measuring something with micron-range precision, thoughts generally turn to a tool with a Mitutoyo or Starrett nameplate. But with a clever design and a little electronics k…

Pushing The Boundaries Of Tiny Mechanical Devices With Compliant Mechanisms

Mechanical actions underlie much of what makes modern day society function, whether it’s electric motors, combustion engines, switches, levers, or the springs inside a toy blaster gun that pr…

Physical Neural Network Can Be Trained Like A Digital One

Here’s an unusual concept: a computer-guided mechanical neural network (video, embedded below.) Why would one want a mechanical neural network? It’s essentially a tool to explore what i…

Electromagnetic Mechanism Makes Reconfigurable Antenna

Antennas are a key component to any RF gadget. But antennas often only perform well over a narrow band of frequencies. For some applications, this is acceptable, but often you would like to reconfi…

Flexures Make This Six-DOF Positioner Accurate To The Micron Level

It’s no secret that we think flexures are pretty cool, and we’ve featured a number of projects that leverage these compliant mechanisms to great effect. But when we saw flexures used in…

3D-Printing Complex Sensors And Controls With Metamaterials

If you’ve got a mechatronic project in mind, a 3D printer can be a big help. Gears, levers, adapters, enclosures — if you can dream it up, a 3D printer can probably churn out a useful p…

Xbox Flexure Joystick Puts You In The Pilot’s Seat

With the recent release of Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Xbox Series X|S there’s never been a better time to get a flight stick for the console, and as you might imagine, there are a numb…

3D Printed Joystick Using Spherical Flexure Joint

One of the many advancements brought about by 3D printing is the rapid development of compliant mechanisms and flexure joints. One such example is [jicerr]’s joystick, which uses a pair of sp…