Place Your Shirts on This Arduino-Powered Board for Automatic Folding
Ty Palowski wanted to over-engineer a more efficient way to be lazy, so he made a machine that folds his tees at the push of a button!
Do you enjoy folding shirts? No? The good news is that with many people working from home these days, this practice tends to be optional. When things do (hopefully) go back to normal, you can reduce your folding time with Ty Palowski’s Automatic Shirt Folding Machine.
Palowski’s device is inspired by the “FlipFold," sold by inventor Debbie Barker in an old TV ad (a short clip of which is shown at around 0:30). Her idea is a board on which you place a shirt, flip the sides together, then flip a panel up to consistently and easily create folds. This project, however, takes things several steps further, adding motors to actuate the three folding axes. The process is automated via an Arduino Uno clone along with some fairly stout-looking MD10C R2 driver boards, and it’s started using a capacitive touch button.
Mechanically, the motors are held in place by 3D-printed mounts, which cleverly clamp using zip ties for friction. Folding surfaces are made out of what appears to be foam board, with pivots made from clear tape. Testing of the device can been seen around 7:15 in the video below, where Palowski folds clothing both by hand and automatically. The machine wins the first round, but it does even better on the second try after he has some practice with it.
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!