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While working for Amorphic Robot Works, Chico tasked me with creating a pneumatic manifold for his latest soft robotic sculpture. The manifold would be mounted on the sculpture needed to be light weight. It also needed to serve as a mounting point for the control circuitry. I proposed a design out of SLA resin given its non porous nature and the detail required for print in place 10-32 threads .
I built the critical features of the design in a way I could relocate them for easy iteration in the future.
The manifolds air pathways were designed to function with the specific 240V Piezo valve chosen for the project. I used specifications from the manufacturer to reverse engineer the critical geometry from the original.
To the left is the basic form I was able to reduce the stock manifold to, from here we had a number of potential configurations. In discussions with Chico and our electronics expert Bill Bowen, it was decided that valves be clustered in sets of four to control distinct quadrants of the sculpture.
In the middle of the project we moved from the design on top to the design on the bottom and ran a tube of plastic in between them. In this photo you can see the difference between design v1 and design v5. The overlapping tabs on v1 had cracked along with the insert location for the threaded barbs. I iterated a couple of times towards thicker and thicker designs.
As we went into production on this part I was unable to get the threads to seal completely, an essential attribute of anything pneumatic. I tried a number of changes including having it manufactured by a third party and none of the manifolds sealed 100%. While testing, I realized I could get one side to seal significantly more often than the other side. We pivoted back to a set of four and when I reprinted the part the problem was solved.
In the photo below you can see an almost full set of my valves wired up to the sculptures air lines.
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