“This is the Technological Tesseract—an electronic puzzle box. The goal of this puzzle is to connect three wires to the jacks in the correct configuration to make the LED matrix light up in a fun way. There are four different colored jacks (red, blue, green, and yellow) on each face, and a shape on each face to serve as an indicator (triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon). To determine where to plug in the wires, you must solve the a series of puzzles.
The motivation behind this puzzle box was to tell my parents and my in-laws that my wife and I were pregnant. After we started working on it, we saw the puzzle box from Glass Onion and mentioned to our families that it would be fun to make something like that. It was a great marketing tool to keep them from suspecting anything. After sending the finished product off to each of them, they were enthralled and had a blast solving it. They didn’t suspect a thing when the words, “WE’RE PREGNANT!!!” rolled across the LED Matrix. We got some priceless reactions and wanted to share our process so that others can hopefully have some fun moments with the design.
Required Tools
- Soldering Iron
- Wire strippers
- 3D printer (You don’t have to own one, you just need access to one—many local libraries have one)
- Phillips Screwdriver for small screws
- Safety Glasses
Est. Required Tool Cost (excluding 3D printer): $52.78
Est. Required Tool Cost (including 3D printer): $230.96
Recommended Tools
- Solder Flux
- Solder Wick
- Multimeter
- Pliers
- Breadboard
Est. Recommended Tool Cost: $60.80
Required Materials
IMPORTANT NOTE: The quantity to the left of each material refers to the total quantity needed of that specific material, not how many item purchases you should make at the given link. If you use the link, you should only purchase one (e.g., don’t purchase 19 packages of M2 screws since a single package contains 30 M2x6mm screws plus 30 of a few other sizes as well).
- 3x AA Batteries
- 1x Black 3D Printer Filament (PLA)
- 1x White 3D Printer Filament (PLA)
- 1x 8x8 LED Matrix
- 19x M2x6mm Screws
- 3x Black 14 AWG black speaker wire
- 6x Banana plugs
- 1x Battery holder for 3 AA
- 1x Arduino Nano
- 2x 2N3904 Transistors
- 16x Banana jacks (RGBY)
- 1x Protoboard (4x6 cm)
- 2x 10k through-hole resistor
- 1x 1k through-hole resistor (use 10k link)
- 1x Solid core 22 AWG insulated Wires
- 1x Solder
- 1x Heat Shrink Package
Est. Material Cost: $174.95”