Finished product!

After completing the code on Snap!, the hand was all set to give a final test to make sure that it worked correctly. I tightened up some loose ends, re-glued a couple of parts, and it was ready to test out. The finished product works great and I am very pleased with how it turned out! Even though it took a little bit of trial and error and re-doing some parts, it worked out in the end and taught me that sometimes it takes a couple tries to make something work how you want it to and that is okay!

Here is a video of the final product:

I am happy with how the robotic hand turned out and I am excited about possibly doing more Hummingbird projects in the future! 

Using Snap! to make the code for the hand

After the hand was complete with the servo motor, the next thing to do was to complete the code on Snap! for the hand to move. This part was pretty simple because there weren't too many parts to add but it did take a little while to get the correct angle measurements. This part took a lot of trial and error before finding the right degree to set the servo at for the hand to move correctly. The servo motor seemed to not be strong enough and wasn't rotating correctly.

The final code that I used for the hand is found below.

Working with the Servo Motor

After the hand was constructed, the next step was to work with the servo motor and attach it to the hand. The first thing that I did was use a screwdriver and unscrewed the original white circle off of the motor and I switched it out for the red cross piece.

Next, I cut out three small pieces of cardboard and used a hot glue gun to glue all of them together as a base where the servo would sit for more support. After gluing those together, I hot glued the servo onto the base and then the whole thing was hot glued onto the hand. 

After the base was glued onto the hand, the next thing that I did was go into Snap! and I set the servo motor to 0°. After this was set, I hot glued all of the five pieces of yarn onto the servo motor on the red cross. This took many tries and I had to re-glue the yarn a couple times because it was not working out in certain placements. I finally found the right place and hot glued the yarn and reinforced it with some tape. 

Beginning to create/construct the Hummingbird Robotic Hand

I found an idea on the Hummingbird kit website of creating a robotic hand using the Hummingbird and I wanted to try it!

The first step was to trace and cut out the shape of a hand using cardboard. The lines on all of the fingers and thumb were reminders for me of where to cut slits into the cardboard to help the hand move correctly. Here is a photo of what that looked like on the piece of cardboard before and after cutting it out.

The next step was to use a sharp blade to cut out the hand and also make slit marks where they were marked on the hand. I also cut out little pieces of a plastic straw and hot glued them on all of the fingers in between the slit marks. 

I then took pieces of yarn and cut five pieces that were all roughly the same length. I put the string through the pieces of straw on each finger and also cut a slit in the middle of the hand in between the 4 fingers and the thumb which is where all of the pieces of string would meet and go through the slit in the hand to come out through the back of the piece of cardboard. This took a little bit of time to fit all of the pieces of string through the pieces of straw and work them through the slit of the hand and the end result looked like this: