3D Printed Toy

E-Portfolio #4

3D Printed Toy on Onshape (click to access)

In this project, we were asked to design a toy on Onshape as a CAD model, and 3D print the object.

Shape Puzzle with Pegs

I decided to design an interactive toy that children would play with and change the location of small pieces on a larger board/base that has pegs. The small pieces come in different shapes like triangles, circles, squares and rectangles. Using those pieces, children can form larger shapes or figures like a human face, or any abstract figure that they want to. They can also put some pieces on top of one another to add more depth or place some pieces inside of others. Each piece is easily rotatable around any peg. Playing with this interactive toy is educational as it features various different shapes and may increase creativity levels of children as they twist, turn and move pieces on the board. As a child, I always liked building and playing with 3D structures and shapes, so that is probably the reason I decided to design something including shapes.

Part 1: Base/Board

First, I created the cylindrical base by sketching and extruding a circle with a diameter of 20 centimeters on the top plane. Then, I added 12 small circles of diameter of 5mm, which would form the base of the pegs on top of the sketch, again working on the top plane. I arranged the distance between each circle to be equal and centered them within the larger circle. This time, I extruded the small circles upwards for 2 centimeters, not downwards, to form 12 pegs.

Part 2: Small Pieces/Shapes

As a further step, working on the top plane, I sketched various shapes including a triangle, a square, a circle, a semicircle, and a rectangle with smaller same-sized circles inside each shape which would become holes to fit the pegs. I was careful to arrange the diameter of the holes to be 6mm, in order not to have problems when placed on the pegs and to make them easily rotatable. Then, I extruded each shape downwards for 10mm and the holes were automatically created since they were on the same sketch. Since pegs have the height 20mm, by this way two shapes would be able to go on top of one another on each peg. As a further point, I used the transform tool to create exact copies of each shape. I added a rectangle and a circle that are hollow in the inside with a smaller thickness to have more variety of shapes.

Assembly of 2 Part Studios

In order to observe the final product and how would the shapes look like when placed on the board, I used Assembly to merge all the models and tried different arrangements. The shapes may form a human face, however it is completely up to one's imagination how to place them on the board.

I used "Cylindrical mate" tool to place the shapes onto the board and merge them with pegs. To the right, there is an example of one arrangement. Below, I played with the rotation of eyebrows and changed the nose and the mouth.