Starting from principles…
Soon after getting a 3D printer capable of doing quality ABS plastic, I wondered if I could print a Rubik’s cube that would come out of the printer already assembled and working. I was able to do it, and made several cubes.
Here is how I attacked it in Mathematica:
Of course, you might have taken apart different cubes, and seen the generic solution, but I wanted to visualize what the constrains where. Here is a graphic that shows that everyface needs to be able to rotate:
for a face to be able to rotate, it needs to be held by a surface which has rotational symmetry. if you need to be able to do it for each orthogonal axis, it is probably a sphere…
Building the core piece
As you probably know, if you have ever tried to build some 3D model, it is crucial to build a water tight model. So as you but surfaces together, they need to be built from the same vertices, so that they are properly sawn together…
Below is just made of 2 cylinders. Notice the outside of polygons is blue, the inside is red.
Then with just rotations, we get the 6 pieces assembled together.
Each of the cylinder is captured in a cavity in the piece in the middle of each face. The cavity is just a little bigger than the head of the piece above. It looks like this:
If we simply add the edges of that piece, which come from a sphere, and planar surfaces…
Here is a section to show the details:
The center piece, with one center face in position
Now we are building the edge pieces. I was getting lost in the code, so I did a visualization with colors so I could find myself again…
And here is the edge piece complete
The corner piece is built the same way, and you see below a corner piece and an edge piece together, separated by a parametric gap.
here are the 8 corner pieces shown together in the proper relative positions
The center piece with all the center face pieces
And finally the whole cube together. I can then just export as STL and print on a 3D printer. I used a stratasys printer with 2 components: the ABS, and the support was in sugar, which is removed by dipping the piece in acid for a few hours. Then it rotates fine, although it remains fragile.
Other ideas on doing this:
I would like to rebuild this using computational geometry since all the surfaces come from 2 spheres, 3 cylinders, a cube, and 3×4 separation planes.
I also wanted to build a metal version of this, which would require flow channels that could be cut after the piece is finished.
