Unfortunately, I was too covered in silicon to document the majority of my casting process. This was not my first time working with silicon, and everything went pretty smooth! Instead of using PVC for the outer mold, I reverse engineered the part from the geometry of the inner mold piece stl. The result was of identical dimensions to the PVC, and a solid friction fit. My main worry was demolding the silicon from the 3D due to the layer lines potentially acting as resistance to pull the mold out. I am happy to report it easily slid out. My only mishap happened once I got the hand pump hooked up - I overinflated it which ripped some of the inner cotton, so it no longer inflated evenly. I would say my main takeaway is that I need to be much more delicate with air pressure as the trend of me popping my projects continues.

Here is the paper. Dynabuttons are also the robot of the week presentation slide I made, but I think this paper is also worth including. I am really interested in electroosmotic pumps as a way to drive movement in a soft robot. Dynabuttons exemplify the quick, animated results of a well designed and tuned pump. This lab has made them embedded on on a PCB as well, creating tiny pumps that can be scaled up and down. While the current use case being shown lives more in the world of haptic response, I think there could be exciting uses within a robot to generate movement or gripping strength. These systems use water will onboard reservoirs, so they do not need larger pumps. They do need 300v of power which is being delivered via an onboard amplifier, but I could see this becoming an untethered system rather easily.