e-Nabling the future

Sometime in 2014, my distant friend Kit Coleman shared a post about the e-Nable organization on my facebook feed. I had met Kit on the soccer field, our kids played together and for a season or two, we coached the boys together. But, after a couple of seasons they gave up on soccer and we didn't stay in touch other than the facebook connection. (Side note... why the hell is it impossible to search my own facebook timeline???)

Anyways, I was intrigued at putting my printer to good use and registered right away. And then. I don't recall that anything happened, I never heard anything from them, other than occasionally getting spammy invites to google hang outs that I always ignored as I was easily sidetracked to look into it any further.

I did however casually keep an eye on the google hang-outs subject lines and knew that they were developing a hand-o-matic software to streamline getting the needed measurements to size the prosthetic for the individual in need. Since not hearing a reply from eNable and not personally knowing anyone in need, I decided not to actively pursue finding someone. I was already too busy, plus printing hands seemed hard, and I was also afraid of the risk of getting someone's hopes up and not being able to deliver or do it right or cause some kind of damage from a medical liability standpoint.

So fast forward 8 months and I get invited to sit on a panel about starting makerspaces for educators and schools being held at the Atlanta Science Festival. The session was at GA Tech Invention Studio.

A teacher comes up to me and talks about wanting to get hands printed because she had TWO ten year old kids in the same class in need. I was like wow. So I recounted how I didn't know much other than e-Nable was out there and that they were making the hand-o-matic software. We exchanged emails and I forwarded her the link to hand-o-matic.

Two days later she replied with .stl files for printing, asking if I new anyone that could print them. I, of course, had to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the great folks at e-Nable had specifically designed the hands to be printed on FDM/FFF consumer grade printers. So after successfully printing a couple of phalanges, we were off and set on printing hands for these two kids (initially known as ProjectA and ProjectB).

My intention is to post each project separately to github repositories with details posted to their respective project pages. This main blog will host general updates.

Here is my initial tweet following success with the first phalanges.

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