Jessica A. Artiles // PROJECT

3D Printed Rings as Puzzles and Souvenirs

As part of my Media Lab class, How to Make (almost) Anything, I 3D printed a ring with a game. I started with the conept of the famous maze puzzles with steel balls from our childhood, added a theme of MIT's 1st Mini-Maker Faire (hapening the very week I was making these) and what resulted was fabulous souveniers for my Organizing Team. The prototypes started as 3D printed rings on the Objet and ZCorp printers, but more my (relatively) mass-scale production, I moved to a laser-cutting friendly design.

How to Make (almost) Anything is the class that gave birth to Fab Labs, now an international movement for makers worldwide. The course is a bootcamp into fabrication technologies (digital and analog) through weekly projects to master a tool/skill/technology per week. I was one of the very few that bit the bullet and continued to work with Neil Gershenfeld, founder and instructor of the class, in the sequel of the class, How to Make Something that Makes (almost) Anything.

Skills

Adobe Illustrator
SolidWorks
Laser Cutting
3D Printing
3D Scanning

Select photos

SolidWorks model of my ring with overhangs as track for the ball

Providing clearance for the ball to roll through the letters

Ring out of the Objet 3D Printer

Iterations in the design, aka towards (small-scale) mass production

An army of laser cut acrylic rings

Promo pic. With safety glasses and all.

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