AliveCube - building blocks for puzzle pieces

I didn't get to play mechanical puzzles until I owned a 3D printer.

I didn't know LiveCube until I 3D-printed a lot of puzzles and have a very good time.

When I finally heard of LiveCube - a building system for polycubes, which was designed for puzzlers before 3D printing era, and still considered desirable and handy for myself, unfortunately its website is gone, not much information is left.

After some deep digging, and remodeling with 3D printability in mind, here comes AliveCube:

• not a clone nor compatible to LiveCube, but:
  • also 1.5cm cube based, just like LiveCube (if I read its document correctly)
  • Although you definitely can't attach AliveCube to a piece built of LiveCube, you can probably build new pieces with AliveCube and mix them with LiveCube pieces to make new puzzles
• similar mechanism
  • only 2 basic “voxels”: 2-stud cube and 4-stud cube
    • in many cases they are interchangeable
  • all polycubes can be built without studs sticking out
  • 4-stud cubes are stronger, so mostly print these
  • To make it 3D printing friendly, connector-plate of original design is omitted. If  really needed, use teststud.stl as extra reinforcement.
• benefits
  • functional & artistic
  • boost rapid modeling
    • The only way faster than 3D-printing is pre 3D-printed building blocks
  • pieces are modifiable
  • blocks are reusable
  • effortless mulit color

simple build instruction

Two 2-stud cubes connect to each other to form a 1x2; subsequently add cubes to reach target shape.

recommended print setting

• layer height: 0.2mm
• support: no

Note on tolerance

I deliberately give it a very tight fit. If tolerance's not right for you, adjust is easy, just fire up OpenSCAD and slide $stud_scale in the Customizer panel. It's a multiplier on stud's diameter. Even better, you can easily testprint different $stud_scale by just scaling teststud.stl in slicer.