October 19, 2025
Description
These letter pads are intended for helping to learn building words from letters.
The arrow geometry allows easy orientation and sequencing. If magnets are put into the foreseen pockets, the letter pads nicely hold onto eachother. The characters are lofted on the frontside to make them tangible. They are also engraved to the backside of the pad to facilitate searching for specific letters.
Design
Parametric design allowed me to automatically adjust the pad width according to the letter width (e.g. the pad with an «I» is much less wide as the one with a «W»). This results in a nicer look of the words built. (non-monospace …?)
With parametric design already done, it was easy to generate the standard latin alphabet (A to Z), but also many special characters (like Ö etc.) and even cyrillic and greek alphabets (sorry for considering them special, this is highly subjective). I should be covering most european languages, as the enlosed list shows. The raw version of this list was generated by ChatGPT. Feel free to ask for additional letters/models to be generated. Best would be if you provide the letter itself or the ASCII code in a comment.
Magnets
I used 3 mm neodyme magnet balls. It could work with smaller ones as well. It might also work with 3x3 cylindrical magnets, but i'm not sure whether the orientation of their magnetic field could make you end up with letter pads pushing each other away… Another idea I had was to put a magnet into the left pocket, and a bearing ball into the right pocket of each letter pad, but since i had to order magnets anyway, I stayed with 2 x 3 mm ball magnets per letter pad and I can assure you this works like a charm.
Slicing
If you add magnets, you need to add a pause just before the pockets get bridged. In any case, a color change above the pad makes the characters more distinguishable from the pad.
Oh: Don't print with a steel nozzle, it attracts the magnets …
Wonder which letters you need to print twice or more? Check out the letter frequency per language i researched for this model: https://www.printables.com/model/298516-magnetic-letters-more-es-and-as
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial — Share Alike
undoz
