Prosthetics and 3D Printing: the design thinking behind FidoHand
Thursday, July 24, 2014
9:47 AM
It’s not very often that people create things for the betterment of others they’ve never met before. We recently got wind of a San Francisco fellow who did just that. Inspired by the Robohand project, Dan Bodner created FidoHand: a six-piece 3D printed prosthesis powered by wrist movement for children missing fingers. We talked with Dan about what inspired him to make FidoHand a reality.
A FidoHand fitted to Mary in the San Francisco bay area. Check out local news coverage of FidoHand here.
Origins of a community-inspired 3D printed prosthesis
“I’m really kind of a tinkerer, I have been my whole life,” says Dan Bodner. Dan is also an avid follower of new technology, including 3D printing. He was intrigued when he heard of the Robohand project featured by MakerBot last year: “There were two players in the original design: Richard Van As, a master carpenter in South Africa and Ivan Owen, a mechanical prop maker in Washington state.”
Owen and Van As developed Robohand with two 3D printers provided by MakerBot. Parents who have children with missing fingers often contact Richard in hopes of making their kids’ lives a bit easier.
Iterating on the design
After learning about Robohand, Dan began thinking how he could design his own 3D printed prosthesis. “It all began through my friend,” he said, a friend at a local Bay Area hospital. She is a doctor who works with children in need of a solution like this.
FidoHand during 3D printing. Check out local news coverage of FidoHand here.
Dan received SketchUp files from a MakerBot designer who had done some of his own modifications to Robohand. “I stayed with SketchUp, because I started with SketchUp. I had the building blocks there,” Dan explained. He didn’t know much about SketchUp before starting the project, so he learned 3D modeling from scratch to design FidoHand. “It looked easy, but to make a printable model took a lot of practice.”
SketchUp’s Extension Warehouse was very helpful along the way, “Solid Inspector was absolutely necessary,” says Dan, “Forget about anything if you don’t have it.” [(Ed.) Somewhere Thom Thom is doing a jig right now.] Dan also used SketchUp STL to generate STL files for his MakerBot. Dan added that a 3Dconnexion mouse helped as well: “You use the left hand to orbit/pan/zoom in 3D and the right for designing.”
Design-thinking for 3D printed prosthetics
The obstacle Dan wanted to overcome was how to distribute 3D prosthetics to people and not have to be physically present to fit them. “There is a great volunteer effort called e-NABLE that helps fit 3D printed prosthetics for children,” Dan says. But he wanted to simplify the process even further.
Dan started by simplifying the design: FidoHand went from a fifty to six-piece design over the course of eleven months of design iterations. The reduction of part numbers is important for a number of reasons: in particular fewer parts means easier assembly and better structural integrity. “I tried to keep all of the parts in a single file, just spread out,” he said when he spoke about his SketchUp file organization. Minor changes were tracked by making parts into components, copying them, and setting them to the side in the SketchUp file. When a new major change was needed, Dan made a new version of the file. He chuckled saying, “I made fifty-plus versions of the file. If I completely screw up or go the wrong direction, I can start over.”
Iterations of FidoHand. Check out local news coverage of FidoHand here.
Dan also developed his own custom fit process. Each FidoHand starts with a few easy measurements from the recipient.
What’s next for FidoHand?
A little girl in Louisiana will receive the second FidoHand in the coming weeks, so Dan is waiting to hear how that goes (and we’ll be calling back to see too). On August 5th, Dan will be speaking at the University of San Francisco in front of the Pediatric Device Consortium, which is sponsored in part by the FDA. There he hopes to gain insights and advice from an interdisciplinary team of professionals on ways to improve FidoHand. “This is really a pivotal point in the development of humankind. The combination of SketchUp and a 3D printer is so empowering for people like me that always have ideas.”
Posted by Deana Rhodes, SketchUp Team
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SketchUp Mobile Viewer: now available for Android tablets
Friday, June 27, 2014
12:05 PM
Remember a few months back when we launched the SketchUp Mobile Viewer app for iOS? Well, today, we're happy to tell you that an Android version of the SketchUp Mobile Viewer is now available on the Google Play Store.
Say hello to the new SketchUp Mobile Viewer for Android
Version 1.0 of the Android viewer is officially available for devices with a 7-inch or larger screen size, running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or above. It is highly recommended that your device have at least 1024Mb of RAM.
So, Androiders (that's a thing, right?): the entire 3D Warehouse—artisan armchairs, double-hung windows, Hello Kitty 777’s and anything else you can imagine—is waiting for you to mutli-touch it on the SketchUp Mobile Viewer. Go ahead: orbit to your heart’s content!
Posted by the SketchUp Team
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Like it or not: ratings are back in 3D Warehouse
Thursday, June 26, 2014
1:54 PM
Today, we’re glad to announce that we’ve implemented a new, cleaner like-based “rating” system for 3D Warehouse.
Now, you can "like" models in order to upvote them and store them in your liked models tab
Model courtesy of samothrace41
As you already know, 3D Warehouse is an amazing collection of models of almost anything and everything in the world—from minions to ZZ Top. But sometimes finding the right model can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. User ratings are important signal about a model that lets you know whether other users have vouched for its greatness!
When we re-launched 3D Warehouse earlier this year, there were a few things missing. Perhaps the most commonly asked-about feature, was the old ratings system.
The task of implementing ratings on the new 3D Warehouse gave us the opportunity to re-think the measure of model quality we wanted to capture. Ultimately, when we took a close look at our old 5-star rating system we came to the conclusion that 5 stars was about 4 too many.
When we looked at the data, about 85% of the ratings were either 5-star or 1-star. By and large, people either like a model, or they don’t. This finding wasn’t that surprising since the criteria for 2, 3, and 4-star ratings probably varies from person to person. For your information, with this new like system, we also migrated all of the historical ratings. Any existing ratings that were 3-stars or better were converted into a “Like.”
Another interesting factoid: it turns out that the #1 source of abuse reports from the old Warehouse were from people who filed complaints about their models being rated 1-star. We like the idea of people using ratings to give each other a pat on the back, and acknowledge each other for uploading great stuff. We’re not as fired up about trolls and bullies who cruise around the site and harass others.
We also took into consideration the notion that star rating systems ask a lot from people. After all, your idea of a model that’s deserving of a 4-star rating is probably different than my idea of a 4-star rating. Unfortunately, the subjectivity that goes into the in between ratings often lead to an ambiguous measure of quality.
The new system is simple: you either like something, or not. Your praise for someone else’s work still helps other people find it better, and if a model isn’t to your liking, not up-voting it doesn’t -- and no one’s feelings get hurt.
Even better, liking a model now has an upside for the “liker” as well. When you sign into your 3D Warehouse account and go to your My Warehouse page, you’ll see a new tab for “Liked Models” (see Fig 2) making it easy to get to the models you like time and time again.

Fig 2. Keep track of models you like with the Liked Models Tab
You might also notice that a Likes stat has been added to the Model info panel (see Fig 3-1) – and it’s click-able. If you click the Likes link, a panel will slide out from the right side of the screen, containing the list of users who liked that model (see Fig 3-2). You can also see how many models each user has liked and click through to their profile page to see the models listed under their Liked Models tab.

Fig 3. Find the likes stat in the model info panel. Click on “Likes” to find out which users have liked the model.
Lastly, we’ve also added Most Liked as a sort option for search results, so you can now filter your search results for model quality, as measured by the 3D Warehouse community. This is slightly different than the Popularity sort, which is based on download statistics.
We think this new system is a bit easier and maybe even friendlier for everyone, thereby encouraging more liking of more things. Hooray for love; ain’t it grand?
Posted by Mike Tadros, Product Manager
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