Soft Robotics: Hw 7c – Design your own mold

For this week we were to design our own mold. Being newer to 3D printing I knew i wanted to dive straight in at least with a cardboard prototype to solidify my understanding of some of the mold making techniques introduced in class last week.

I just got trained on the 3d printers at Tandon and am excited for trying 3d printing in the future ❤ I decided to try the 3 part mold w/core, hoping to create a Starfish shaped grabber / inflatable actuator. I included the slides from class I was inspired to try below from Kari’s Week 4 lecture Introduction to Silicone Mold Design Concepts and Approaches

I ended up using more Silicone than I had hoped due to the cardboard walls leaning outwards and a leak in the center, maybe around 150 -180 vs 100, would definitely design a smaller mold for the next step.

Lessons Learned:

Create thicker walls for part A + B, I had originally made them thinner to help maybe decrease the needed amount of silicone but overcompensated, and when removing from mold some of the walls had some sizable tears to where I decided to hold off on part C until doing another model
Start with a simple shape – like a square to really understand the characteristics of silicone
Use a sturdier material – my cardboard was too thin and so the sides began to warp / buckle. I was able to wrap 2 hair twist ties around the the frame while it cured but helping alleviate the warping.
Be careful with overhangs –
- I think some of my walls due to the warping created difficult overhangs for the test cast removal
Design small –
- while prototyping try designing / scaling down to the smallest size thats still helpful in order to conserve materials / & cure+ iterate faster
Next test-
- Either a laser cutter one with small rectangles, gluing together with acrylic glue
  - could also do in sectional stacking to help avoid possible leaky edges
- Test 3d rundown w/ Arnab
- Or have Laguardia print @ cost