Week 3

April 20, 2018 

We updated  our design proposal taking into consideration the advice we received from our fellow. A majority of our time this week was spent updating our original design of the cube and generating ideas on how we can integrate the magnets into our designs effectively. You can see Kaley working hard on drafting new piece designs in figure 1. Other group members started the design process on other creative puzzles we can include in our set. Other pivotal materials needed for our design were researched, and we began the process of ordering these materials.

Figure 1: Kaley Designing New Puzzle pieces

Most research was done on finding the right magnet to hold our puzzles together. We needed the magnet to be small enough to fit inside the pieces and strong enough to hold them together. Our first idea was to use rare earth neodymium magnets, shown in figure 2, Neodymium magnets are the strongest magnets for their size.However, these magnets are very expensive and too strong for our light pieces. We decided to use ceramic magnets, which are weaker and much less expensive. The magnets used in our prototype are 0.5 in x 0.125 in ceramic magnets with a strength of 0.6 lbs. This ceramic magnet we used is shown in figure 3.

               

Figures 2 & 3: Neodymium Disk Magnet (left) and Ceramic Disk Magnet (right)

We 3D-printed a small 6cm x 6cm x 6cm prototype cube. The actual cube will be 10cm x 10cm x 10cm and will consist of 18 pieces, but this model is smaller and only has 3 pieces. Our lab mentor, Melvut Bayram, is shown in figure 4 attempting to complete the prototype cube. Even with 3 pieces, it was a struggle to complete the cube without a colored exterior. (Look under Videos for Better Understand to see his completion of the prototype cube)

Figure 4: Our lab instructor trying to solve the Prototype PuzNetix Puzzle

Figure 5: All Done!