e-NABLE pencil and utensil holder and adpaters

thingiverse

The e-NABLE hands are amazing and give people the ability to do so many things they couldn't do otherwise, but they have some limitations when it comes to holding smaller objects like pens and pencils, knives, forks, spoons, toothbrushes, etc. There are utensil holders that can be attached in place of a hand, and there are large tool adapters that can be connected to the palm. I wanted something simple and sturdy that could be permanently attached to the hand without getting in the way of doing other grasping tasks, and which could be used to hold many different everyday objects. Here's what I came up with: It consists of a small TPU part with tabs and a hex holed tube that can be screwed to the palm just in front of the thumb. Because it is flexible TPU, it can be used on many different e-NABLE hand designs including the Talon, Osprey, Ody, Phoenix, and Kwawu. The TPU part is designed to hold a pencil or clamps with hex pins. The clamps can be made in all different sizes and configurations to hold various sized objects. I made clamps to hold flatware and pens, but the possibilities are endless. The hex pin clamps can be easily inserted and removed from the TPU holder. They're a modification of a cool bag clip design on Thingiverse by MasterFX (thing 330151). Here's a short video showing how everything works and what you can do with them: https://youtu.be/2RgJ1hTTcro All of the parts can be used on either a right or left hand without any modifications to the STL files. The clamps can be printed as one piece with no support. Don't scale the parts - use the same scale on all sizes of hands. For hands for very small children, the TPU pencil/hex pin holder may be too large. For the prototype, I made the clamps out of PLA, but for holding eating utensils, I would make them out of PETG. That way the clamps can be left on the person's flatware and washed (by hand - not dishwasher) together with the flatware.