Building on the USB interface, the design can be extended to also allow a pen (standard biro) or pencil to be used. This extends the “upcycle” mantra associated with the USB design, but comes with the penalty of not having any depth control due to the uncertainty surrounding the pen used. The design can be 3D printed in under 10 minutes and cost less than 2p each.
A simple adapter has been developed, that can be rapdily printed using FFF and SLA technologies, to allow someone to use a USB stick to open doors and operate simple mechaisms and break transmission paths of COVID-19.
The simple design, that takes less than 15 minutes to print on our standard 3D printers costs just £0.04 and can take advantage of the old USB sticks people have at home and in the workplace. If the USBs available also have a retracting head, or a cover for the interface, the contact patch can be sealed from the user when not in use.
University buildings (like many other buildings throughout our cities) have many hundreds of users every day, all needing to move through and access a variety of different spaces, each with their own locks and access controls. In a world of social distancing, we need to think about how people move through buildings and access spaces efficiently, while preventing bottlenecks, minimising transmission risks, and still allowing important security and access controls to stay in place.
Several industries have been moving to a working environment involving hot desking. In a post-lockdown, COVID-19 world this poses potential issues with social distancing and transmission paths. This challenge asks how hot desking can be made possible whilst also trying to contain the transmission of COVID-19.
In recent weeks the fight against Covid-19 has seen both an exponential demand for key medical equipment and an array of restrictions imposed on global manufacturing and supply chains, resulting in a debilitating shortage of necessary healthcare provisions; inhibiting the capacity of health services to treat patients with potentially catastrophic consequences. The scale of this […]
We have put together a document summarising the MHRA minimum useful specification for an emergency ventilator. This is considered the minimum required level of machine that would be useful to the NHS. The original specification can be found here. The PDS style requirements document can be found here. Access has been opened up so you […]
Harry has had a poster accepted to DCC 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia for the end of June. The work presented looks at the capability of varying mass properties in rapid protoyped parts by manipulating the infill density through the part(s). This work follows on from Harry’s work on identifying the effect on user perceptions of […]
Some of the work undertaken as part of the protoTwinning project involved an in depth understanding of the Digital Twin such that the project could determine the appropriateness of the paradigm to early stage design and prototyping activities. The paper is the result of a systematic literature review into existing publications and contributes to the […]
We started March 2020 with a quick visit the guys at Troll Labs at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. It was a massively productive visit. Troll Labs have a number of past and present research projects that align nicely to the DMF-Lab and the protoTwinning project, specifically the capture of […]
Harry’s first paper has been accepted to Design 2020! Titled “Looks like but does it feel like? Investigating the influence of mass properties on user perceptions of rapid prototypes” the paper looks at how mass, balance and inertia are considered by people through manipulation of an example part. It was found that each of the […]