I’ve been trying to come up with a nice header for the blog for a while. I wanted something which combines most of my geeky hobbies together… That’s when I had the idea of 3D printing a 1x1x4 Rubik’s cube-like puzzle with the blog’s name written on it – in Japanese!I designed the puzzle on
OpenSCAD, as always. I had the opportunity to try out tbuser’s pin connectors which I’d been wanting to include in Rubik’s cubes designs for a while. (My previous puzzles don’t have such convenient compliant mechanisms and depend on a lot of parts being glued together.) For the letters, I used Inkscape to make dxf files to be extruded, similarly to how I made the map puzzles. To finish it up, I painted the pieces with nail polish.
The result is pretty ok. The printing resolution isn’t the greatest, and the pins don’t work as well as I’d like them to. At least with my current printer, Cupcake CNC, I don’t think I could pull off a whole Rubik’s cube connected only with these pins. I’m starting to feel like my 3D printer is too old, in fact, there are 2 newer generations of Makerbot printers, and several other brands have appeared since I built mine… Maybe it’s time for an upgrade?
my Shumi 