Teenage millionaire successfully creates Doctor Octopus suit

Erik Finman, the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, recently made headlines for creating a four-armed suit resembling Marvel's Doctor Octavius ​​from Spider-Man for a young fan who suffers from hypermobility.

Finman, 19, got his start in the cryptocurrency space at the age of 12, investing a $1,000 gift from his grandmother into Bitcoin, which is now worth around $3 million, and is considered one of the world's most influential teenagers.

The teenager has been involved in a number of projects over the past few years, from startups to a partnership with NASA, but his most exciting venture has to be transforming a 10-year-old comic book fan into a life-sized version of the villain Doctor Octopus with the help of a prosthetic.

Aristou Meehan in Doctor Octopus costume. Source: odditycentral

Aristou Meehan suffers from joint mobility disorder and always thought a custom-made Dr. Octopus suit would make his life a lot easier.

Obviously, getting your hands on any of the gadgets that appear in comics is a rarity, but that didn't stop Meehan from coming up with a workable sketch of a four-armed prosthetic. And when Erik Finman saw it, he decided it was worth making a reality.

“He came up with this idea because he's a big comic book fan, a big Spider-Man fan, and the idea was to have his own Doctor Octopus suit. He said, ‘That would solve my problem,’” Finman told Digital Trends.

"I thought it was such a smart idea and such a good idea. For me, it would have been great if someone had helped me when I was that age. So I felt a sense of empathy in many ways."

The young millionaire assembled a “scrappy team of engineers” and set to work building the Doctor Octopus suit. However, building a functioning prosthetic, especially one as complex as Doctor Octopus’s, would typically cost tens of millions of dollars, so Finman and his team decided to rely on 3D printing technology and build their own custom printer.

The design and production process took about six months, a relatively short time for such an ambitious project. However, the results were impressive.

Like its original inspiration, this bizarre prosthetic features four long, bendable arms, controlled by microcontrollers mounted on the back and powered by a total of eight servo motors.

These motors are powered by a 4-cell Lithium motorcycle battery, which is relatively small in size, helping the total weight of the suit to be only about 5.7 kg, meaning that even 10-year-old Aristou could wear it.

"The whole thing was designed from scratch, we didn't want to use off-the-shelf components other than the electronics because of the size and weight, instead of using a mount, we designed it so that every piece had different functions, for example each piece in the arm joint holds servos, the entire cable control system is mounted around this joint so the user can move more freely, there are lots of little holes and joints to run cables and wires through," Finman told All3dp.

"One of the things we wanted to do was to bend the arms and have them do all the rotations and bends. To do that, we could have used 50 expensive, heavy motors, but that wouldn't have worked. So what we did was we took these coffee cups and these three very thin carbon fibers that pull the cups in the direction we wanted. And on the back, each arm has a motor, and four motors that control the position of the wires so they pull the way we wanted. So we did it in a really clever, cheap, lightweight way, because that was one of the biggest problems."

For now, Aristou’s Doctor Octopus suit is just a prototype, capable of lifting light objects and making him look cool in front of his friends or at cosplay events like ComicCon, but it’s also a sign of things to come. Erik Finman believes that with the right refinements and modifications, the suit could one day lift objects as heavy as a car, and have a variety of applications in industries like construction or medicine.

“Right now it's like a prototype, but I've talked to a lot of people who are interested in developing it further,” the young Bitcoin billionaire shared.