[Angel LM]

Hi,

My name is Ángel, I’m from Madrid (Spain) and I’m the author of Thor. I have been working on this project for more than 2 years. In August 2016 I released the project.
I’m really concerned about OpenSource, I think that it’s the most effective way to learn, teach,develop and improve.

As I have already talked about the origins and the purposes of this project in the documentation and you presumably have read it already, I’ll start telling the story of Thor’s design.

In first place, when I started this project I barely knew how to design in 3D. I mean, I had a 3D printer and I have designed some pieces then, but nothing that can be compared with this.
To be honest, neither did I knew about how robotics arm work. I had seen a pair of them in real life, and some others in YouTube, but did I know some about their guts? No.
As you can imagine at this point, I had to search, investigate and learn about robotic arms and 3D design. It took me about a month before I decided to start with the initial design.

So, let’s have some fun. These were the first design ideas:

As you can see I wasn’t sure about how to do it at first, but iteration after iteration it began to take shape.

Eventually it became this, what I call “the first prototype”

Maybe you can think that the actual design is the first prototype, but it isn’t. It’s the second one.

When I finished the first prototype I was not very happy with the result…
So I decided to delay the release until I fix the most critical errors of that design.​

As I said I thought that it wasn’t ready enough to spread the word.
At this point every part of Thor were in the same FreeCAD file. That was convenient for the design process, but not for sharing! Also, I wanted to fix the most critical issues, so I made the second prototype. The
split & fix process took me several months because I had to redo the design from zero, but it deserved the pain.

Although there are some issues to solve yet, I was happy enough with the result to spread the word and share the design!

Hope you like it and enjoy this project as much as I do!

Best regards,
Ángel LM

[Dan Meisner]

Ángel, this is awesome–thanks for all your hard work on this! I’d love to put it on Orchard, which is like Github for open source hardware. It’s a free social network for makers with browser-based CAD, a library of open source designs (that grow and evolve as people edit them), social tools, and educational and 3D printing resources. Three of us spent the last few years building it because we are tired of things designed to break, and think open source is the answer. ;

Anyone can upload it, but as the creator, it would make sense to come from you! If you “seed” the design on Orchard, people from this community (and around the world with an Internet connection) can begin to collab/edit/evolve the design: https://3DOrchard.com ;

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