The iconic 3D Rubik’s Cube. It was invented by the Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik in1974. When Rubik licensed his invention, three years later, it became incredibly popular and by 2009, over 350 million copies of the cube had been sold.
These numbers make the Rubik’s Cube the world’s best-selling puzzle game — and perhaps even the world’s best-selling toy ever.
The standard Rubik’s Cube features six faces covered by nine stickers of one of the six colors. The white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow surfaces can be arranged, via an internal pivot mechanism, to allow each face to turn independently to scramble the colored facets. To solve the puzzle, each facet is returned to position so that the sides make up a single block of color.
New 3D Printed Toys: Ozo the Bear
Recently, Emmanuel Carrillo, a designer at Fossil working on the Adidas team, has developed a ‘twistable’ children’s puzzle based on the Rubik’s Cube which can be 3D printed easily, and is ideally taking the shape of a teddy bear.
Carrillo came up with this amazing design while he was a student at the University of Cincinnati, and he says the idea was to take the traditional Rubik’s Cube and reinterpret it into a more kid-friendly form, one that would be more appealing to kids younger in age.
“I took my 3D printed prototype and made silicone molds so that I could make multiple copies of the puzzle,” Carrillo says. “I’m an industrial design graduate from the University of Cincinnati, and I enjoy soccer, fixed gear bicycles, rubik’s cubes and I love a good burger and southern style sweet tea. When I’m not designing, you can find me in my shop working on my next DIY project. There is never a shortage of half-finished projects on my desk.”
Carrillo says every part of this most excellent toy can be built on a conventional, personal FDM printer, and all the files to make Ozo the Bear can be downloaded for free at Cults3D.com.
The bears were printed at 25mm layer height with no support, and the body parts were printed together. The pin was printed separately. Test parts were printed on a Polyprinter 229 at 25% infill between 180 and 200 mm, and the project took about 4 hours.
