I don’t know how well you can see this, but there’s a little bit,

bit sticking out there.

Yeah. Okay.

Maybe you can see it in reflection.

But that.

Is fairly easy to cross going in

and then a little harder to cross going out.

Right. So that’s the behavior that we want.

So here are the choices that I made.

Simple machines.

I’m using incline plains.

Okay.

So going in I want it to be relatively easy to close.

So I made this a little bit shallower and coming up.

I want that to be not impossible.

But but it’s a medium difficult to open.

We don’t want it to open easily. Right.

So this is a steeper slope.

I don’t know if you can really see that here on this plot, but, on the drawing.

But this is a little bit

longer of a slope, and this is a little bit shorter of a slope,

and then it’s flat in the middle,

because if it was pointed in the middle the point would wear out.

Right.

So we have easy medium.

And wear resistance.

Those are the choices that I’m making when I’m designing

that little piece that’s sticking out.

That is engineering.

And what branch of engineering.

Would that fall under mechanical and mechanical engineering.

into a different.

I mean, you know, you could talk about design

for additive manufacturing because I could make that shape.

Right.

That shape is not difficult to make in three dimensional printing.

It’s difficult to make in machining because you’d have to fixture

from a bunch of different directions to get the machine tools in there.

design for additive manufacturing and,

mechanical engineering, simple machines,

materials, properties and wear resistance.

Did you, did you go through some iterations looking at

like different clasps or anything, or were you pretty set on what you,

you know, just knew just, because of your experience doing this?

So, I went through

a couple of iterations, mostly to, get the interaction right.

So, and again, I don’t know if you can see this, but I added

little ears that stick out on either side of the top here.

They stick out just for symmetry.

It’s the one over here that matters.

That’s the one that I tested.

And so here is the test bed.

Okay. Right.

So I 3D printed a section of this,

which would be impossible to do in, in regular machining.

Right.

So additive manufacturing, really easy to make a prototype.

It took, you know, half an hour to print or something.

And then, the question is, what kind of behavior do I have here?

Is it enough of it or action that I’m happy with that snap?

Because I don’t want it to be

too difficult to move.

And I also don’t want it to

I don’t want this thing to stick out so far that it interferes

with you getting your finger in there to get the SD card out.

So that looks like this.

So that’s like this.

You want to be able to get in here

and get the SD card out.

If this thing if this little nub sticks out too far, it’ll get in your way.

The other thing that I did, was

I added material above the SD card slot.

So you can’t put the SD card

into something above the slot and leaves it inside the instrument.

Which was pretty annoying before.

So this then.

Right.

So we have that there, and then

we push and it,

you think it latches, but it just kind of stops.

And if you shake it hard enough, it’ll fall out.

So what we want is to have something that will stop it falling out.

Because if that little card falls out in the field, you’re not finding it again.

It’s much too small. Yeah.

So, so there’s the little door.

There’s. Brilliant.

And I just found out as I was putting one of these back together, showing you,

that you really need to leave this door open when you’re putting the lid on.

Because the lid and the door

can interact with each other and open the door.

So new considerations, order of operations,

following instructions, all that good stuff.

Awesome.

Iteration is really important.

Imagination is really important.

Empathy is really important.

Right.

We put that extra piece of material in there to stop people

losing their SD card inside the, instrument.

If we’re thinking about it from their point of view, you might not care.

So, you know, and then.

And then I had it before where it didn’t have that piece of materials

like, oh, I can add that material.

That’s easy enough to do.

Whereas if we had to do this in traditional manufacturing,

we would have to anticipate all of this

ahead of making a traditionally manufactured prototype.

And we get to maybe iterate ones based on cost.

The thing about additive manufacturing, especially plastic additive manufacturing,

3D printing, is that you can iterate kind of as much as you want.

And so lets you iterate and reconsider.

And do that in a way that is really low cost and quick.

that’s that’s why you want to learn these things.

That’s why we want people to learn to do 3D printing is because that’s how they

that’s how you make stuff these days.

And, and even if you’re going to traditionally manufacturing if you can 3D

printed to test it, test fit your parts, make sure they’re working properly.

Make sure your mechanisms are actually behaving themselves.