Double Sided Labyrinth Puzzle

This is a double sided labyrinth puzzle. The difficulty level should be okay for young school kids.

Assembly

You print the sides separately and then assemble them. In addition to the two printed sides you will need:

• a metal ball 5mm or 5.5mm diameter (cheap paint mixing balls will do)
• 4 screws M3x25mm + 4 nuts
• some acrylic or polystyrene “glass” plates about 1-2mm thick

You can get cheap transparent acrylic plates at most home improvement stores or on any online market place. You need to cut two plates 98x80mm - if you don't have a table saw with the correct blade you can also just score the acrylic/polystyrene from both sides using a cutter knife and then break it over the edge of a table. Use a cutter knife or scoring tool to scrape off sharp edges or use a file/sand paper to file the edge (slowly).

You need to drill four holes into each acrylic plate - the holes should be slightly over 3mm wide (for M3 screws). Use a Dremel (or similar) at low speed or use a hand drill - otherwise the acrylic will simply melt and give you a bad hole. To make drilling easier I included a slice of one side that you can use as a template - alternatively print one side and stop the printer after 2 or 3 layers.

Then put one acrylic plate on the first side - drop the ball into the grid (try not to trap it in the two small closed areas). Push the screws in from the acrylic plate - try not to lose the ball. Add the second side on the reverse - the two sides should be back to back. Align the two drop holes - they fit perfectly in exactly one orientation. Push the screws through the second side. Add the second acrylic plate and secure it with the nuts. Done.

Modification

Both sides use the same script with different configurations. The configurable part is between “START OF CONFIGURATION” and “END OF CONFIGURATION”.

The “gridsize” variable gives you the size of the puzzle in grid squares for X and Y. Adjust it to change the puzzle size.

The “wall_v” array contains “1” for each separator wall that is oriented vertically - each sub-array is a horizontal line of those walls, each 0 or 1 value is the hint for a wall from left to right (0=no wall, 1=create wall).

The “wall_h” array contains the same hints for horizontally aligned walls. Simply manipulate those arrays and press F5 to see what happens - it will be quite intuitive once you see it.

The “start_cell” and “end_cell” variables contain the grid coordinates for the drop holes. Counting starts at zero.

The “// Various measures” section contains feature sizes in Millimeters. Make sure your features are big enough for the kind of ball you are using - my own values are good for 5.5mm balls.

The “// Flags…” section contains hints whether to generate certain features. Set those values to “true” or “false” to activate or deactivate features.

For double sided puzzles the flags that you find should be fine. You may need to add “middle screw” holes if you increase the grid size significantly.

For single sided puzzles you should deactivate the ball holes and activate the nut holes. Single sided puzzles should then use M3x10mm screws.

To generate an STL - press F6 (full rendering) and then F7 (Export STL).

Have fun!