British Spooks Issue Yearly Teaser

December 12, 2024 by Jenny List 17 Comments

As a British taxpayer it’s reassuring to know that over in Cheltenham there’s a big round building full of people dedicated to keeping us safe. GCHQ is the nation’s electronic spying centre, and just to show what a bunch of good eggs they are they release a puzzler every year to titillate the nation’s geeks. 2024’s edition is out if you fancy trying it, so break out your proverbial thinking caps.

The puzzle comes in several stages each of which reveals a British landmark, and we’re told there’s a further set of puzzles hidden in the design of the card itself. We know that Hackaday readers possess fine minds, so you’ll all be raring to have a go.

Sadly GCHQ would for perfectly understandable reasons never let Hackaday in for a tour, but we’ve encountered some of their past work. First the Colossus replica codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park was the progenitor of the organisation, and then a few years ago when they had an exhibition from their archive in the London Science Museum.

A 3D-printed puzzle for the visually impaired. The pieces have both a texture and a slant.

A Puzzle For The Visually Impaired, Or Blindfolded

July 24, 2024 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

There’s no reason why a visually impaired person can’t enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It just needs to look a little different. Or, in this case, feel different.

16-year-old [feazellecw] has come up with just the solution — a puzzle with pieces that have both a defining texture and a slant in the z-height to them. While there is no picture on the puzzle face to speak of, instead there is a satisfying end result. You could change it up and add a relief image if you wanted, as long as you still observed the diagonal lines, the z-slant, and the little hole in the bottom that helps differentiate it from the top.

As [feazellecw] says, it’s important to find a box to help keep the pieces together during assembly; a 3D-printed box would be a nice touch. Files for this 15-piece puzzle are available if you’d like to make one for yourself or someone else, but just the idea might inspire you to make your own variant.

Don’t like putting puzzles together? Build a robot to do it for you.

Acrylic Light Puzzle Has A Point

November 30, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 4 Comments

[JBV Creative] recently became a proud owner of a laser cutter and, like most of us, started to think about what they could make with it. The answer was simple, a clever little piece of art or puzzle made of stacked acrylic.

He created some text and extruded it from a single point, but not every part intersected with every plate, giving each plate an indecipherable appearance. This allows a small light source (like the LED likely on the back of your phone) to cast a shadow on the wall. With some 3D printed brackets and spacers, it was mounted to a nice piece of cherry plywood. Overall, the technique is quite simple and easy to understand. [JBV Creative] didn’t include more detail on the process, which is a shame because it looks like a beautiful effect to recreate for some puzzles.

These glowing coasters are fantastic if you’re looking for engraved acrylic with a light source. Or this puzzle that lights up as the pieces are placed.

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A wooden table with a puzzle on top of it sits in an off white room with a light wood floor. A red chair sits behind the table and the slats of the rolled away tambour top are visible.

Tambour Table With A Puzzling Secret

November 1, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 12 Comments

Some people really like puzzles. [Simone Giertz] is one of these serious puzzle lovers and built a transforming table (YouTube) to let her easily switch between puzzles and more mundane tasks, like eating.

While there are commercial solutions out there for game tables with removable tops and simpler solutions like hinged lids, [Giertz] decided to “make it more complicated and over-engineered than that.” A tambour top that rolls out of the way makes this a unique piece of furniture already, but the second, puzzle table top that can be raised flush with the sides of the table really brings this to the next level.

If that wasn’t already enough, the brass handles on the table are also custom made. In grand maker tradition, [Giertz] listened to her inner MYOG (Make Your Own Gnome) and got a lathe to learn to make her own handles instead of just buying some off the shelf.

If you’re less enamored of puzzles, you may want to see how Jigsaw Puzzles are Defeated. If you’re worried about losing pieces, check out these 3D Printed Sliding Puzzles.

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Jigsaw Puzzles Are Defeated

August 4, 2022 by Brian McEvoy 30 Comments

To some folx, puzzles are the ultimate single-player game, but to others, they are like getting a single Tootsie Roll on Halloween. [Shane] of Stuff Made Here must fall into the latter category because he spent the equivalent of 18 work-weeks to make a robot that solves them automatically. Shots have been fired in the war on puzzles.

The goal of this robot is to beat a hybrid idea of two devilish puzzles. The first is all-white which could be solved by taking a piece at random and then checking its compatibility with every unsolved piece. The second is a 5000-piece monster painted white. There is a Moby Dick theme here. Picking up pieces like a human with fingers is out of the question, but pick-and-place machines solved this long ago, and we learn a cool lesson about how shop-air can create negative pressure. Suction. We wonder if anyone ever repurposed canned air to create a vacuum cleaner.

The meat of this video is overcoming hurdles, like a rhomboidal gantry table, helping machine vision see puzzle pieces accurately, and solving a small puzzle. [Shane] explains the solutions with the ear of someone with a technical background but at a high enough level that anyone can learn something. All the moving parts are in place, but the processing power to decode the puzzle is orders of magnitude higher than consumer machines, so that will wait for part two.

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Complicated Calculated Solution To 3D-Printed Puzzle

February 13, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

3D printers have made a lot of things possible that were either extremely difficult or downright impossible with traditional tooling. Certain shapes lend themselves to 3D printing, and materials and tooling costs are also generally greatly reduced as well. One thing that may not be touched on as often, though, is their ability to rapidly prototype solutions to complex mathematical problems, in this case taking the form of a 3D printed maze, known as a dodecahedral holonomy maze, with an interesting solution.

The puzzle presents itself as a sphere composed of various inlaid hexagons which form a track for the puzzle piece, or “rook”. The tracks create the maze for the rook to travel, as some paths are blocked when the rook is oriented in certain ways. To solve the puzzle, the player must rotate the rook by moving it around the hexagons in such a way that its path isn’t physically blocked by any of the pegs in order to successfully reach the exit. This might seem like a fun toy to have on its surface, but the impressive thing about this is that the solutions are designed to reduce the likelihood of solving the puzzle with any “brute force” methods while at the same time having more than one path that will reach the exit as well as several bottlenecks that the puzzle solver must traverse as well.

There are actually many possible puzzles that can be produced in this size and shape, and all have predetermined solutions with cleverly chosen paths. This might seem like a lot but when you realize that the entire build from concept to 3D modeling to implementation was done by [Henry Segerman] and a group of other mathematicians at Oklahoma State University it starts to become more clear how the puzzle was so well-designed. In fact, we’ve featured some of his other mathematically-modeled builds in the past as well.

Thanks to [Inne] for the tip!

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Color Dot Puzzle Will Wrinkle Your Brain

February 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

2022 is a good year for puzzles, and if you’re getting tired of Wordle, you might be after a new challenge. This color puzzle from [Sebastian Coddington] could be just what you’re looking for.

[Sebastian] describes the 4×4 Color Dot Puzzle as a sort of combination of the ideas behind the Rubik’s Cube and the 15 puzzle. The aim is to arrange the 16 colored tiles on the board to form four single-colored 2×2 squares in the overall 4×4 board. The puzzle is 3D printed, using 6 colors of filament – black for the body of the puzzle, white for the control sticks, and yellow, green, red, and blue for the individual tiles.

We haven’t seen any mathematical proofs of how to beat the game, but we’re sure [Sebastian] has gotten good at beating the puzzle having designed it himself. According to tipster [Michael Gardi], who knows a thing or two about 3D printing games himself, the puzzle makes for a fun little mind teaser.

If you’re more of a jigsaw person, consider this advanced illuminated build.