Hollow Dice with Ball Inside

Creative Technologies Design Challenge 2: 3D Printed Interlocking Shapes

As the seconde design challenge of the Creative Technologies class (fall 2019), we are required to design and fabricate a 3D object that consist of at least 2 interlocking parts, which cannot separate from each other while they can each move independently.

I design this hollow dice with a red ball inside it, with the reference of a Chinese handicraft, the Bodhi Seed Dice with Red Bean (玲珑骰子).

This dice is a kind of popular toy during the Tang Dynasty in China. It was initially made of ivory, then people used the bodhi seed later. By using the principle of thermal expansion and contraction, they can put the red beans directly into the dice. This handicraft has a very beautiful meaning. Tingyun Wen (温庭筠), a Tang Dynasty poet, describe this dice with the sentence 玲珑骰子安红豆,入骨相思知不知, which means like a red bean in the exquisite dice, the lovesickness is deep in my heart.

With our current technology, designing and printing a 3D model of this dice is a very easy process. No one else has posted a similar project so far, so I shared my drawings online, you can donwload it on both GrabCAD and Thingiverse. Hope you can have some fun with it!