TL;DR: I believe #BlackLivesMatter. I still can’t say anything more eloquently than what has been said by others elsewhere, so I’m going to chip into the cause in my own way. If you’ve donated to a reputable social justice charity, I’m more than happy to send you some 3D Printed #earsavers or touch-free door openers.
Despite law enforcement agencies across the country telegraphing they don’t believe so, black lives do matter. To help the cause in a small way, I designed a new earsaver and a touch-free door opener/keypad stylus.
The earsaver is a modified version of the NIH-approved design found here: https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover/3dpx-013615. No critical outside dimensions were altered, and the part remains very flexible. Earsavers are very useful for anybody who needs to wear a mask (aka EVERYBODY WHO LEAVES THEIR HOME). You put this on the back of your head and hook your mask straps around it instead of around your ears. This takes the pressure off your ears and makes wearing the mask much more tolerable.
Creating the door opener/stylus was a bit more involved; I created the design from scratch, using a few existing designs as inspiration. The hook is useful for opening door handles without touching the surfaces. A strip of copper tape wrapped around the fist allows the stylus to function on capacitive touch screens, as long as you touch the bottom of the strip with your thumb. This is useful for pressing buttons at the self-checkout line in grocery stores.
If you’d like some of these doodads, I’m happy to send them to you free of charge. Since I literally finalized the design at lunch today, I don’t have a huge stockpile right now. For now, I’m going to prioritize those who have donated to reputable social justice related charities, but I aim to eventually provide these for anybody who wants them, so feel free to reach out!
