Spherical Jigsaw Puzzle

cults3d

I pondered the concept of a spherical jigsaw puzzle, envisioning it as a three-dimensional representation of the Wikipedia logo; indeed, someone on Thingiverse has already created one, but what if the pieces formed a thin shell? I thought about what would happen if you made the pieces thicker. If you do, you cannot simply cut the sphere along the edges of each piece with an imaginary knife pointing at the center, because you wouldn't be able to get the pieces in and out. So then I realized that if you cut the pieces out in such a way that you can actually get them in and out of the puzzle, then the result is a jigsaw puzzle which requires a specific order to put together, making it more interesting. Here's the outcome of my musings, along with the Python (Jupyter Notebook) code. Printing these pieces isn't particularly easy. I find that when I print something with a round surface, if it's oriented downwards, it doesn't produce a good printed surface. What worked best for me was printing these pieces, with support, tilted at a 45-degree angle, with the outer spherical surface on top.