Fidget

Create 3D-printable mechanical fidget toys of different shapes made of interconnected gears.

What is this?

This is a minimalist tool for building mechanical fidget toys through functional geometry operations.

What does it look like?

Prints

A batch of colorful cubes.

Why?

I got fascinated by this Gear Ball I saw at my friend's place in San Francisco. He was kind enough to give it to me and I promised to make a cube version of it.

After a bit of research I came across this beautiful Gear Heart that had a better version of pins.

I thought it would be a fun exercise to make my own version of it and share it with the family. You can turn it into any shape and share the joy with family and friends.

Installation

1. Install uv (if you haven't already):

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

2. Create a virtual environment and install all dependencies (including dev):

uv venv --python 3.12
source .venv/bin/activate # On Windows use: .venv\Scripts\activate
uv sync --all-extras --dev
uv pip install jupyter

Usage

uv run jupyter notebook

Check out the example notebook to learn how to:

• Create a core structure with customizable diameter
• Generate gears with custom profiles and configurations
• Apply different shapes (cube, sphere) to your fidget toy
• Add connecting pins for assembly
• Export the parts for 3D printing

Get In Touch

If you have any questions or feedback, send me an email at [email protected].