Tic Tac Toe Game

I always found 3D printing very interesting.  I think it is really cool that you can create a physical object from a 3D design.  With 3D printing, I created a tic tac toe game.  If you follow these steps, you will be able to create one too! 

• PLA 3D printing filament You Can Buy Here
• 3D printer with a 12 inch by 12 inch bed
• SOLIDWORKS software
• A computer that supports SOLIDWORKS
• Matter Control Software

The first thing I did in creating this project was design the O for the game using SOLIDWORKS. I started by using the circle tool to create a circle that has a diameter of 2.85 inches. The next thing I did was draw a smaller circle inside of the first circle that I made. I did this by selecting the circle tool and then drawing a circle from the center point of the first circle. The smaller circle has a diameter of 1.80 inches. After doing this, I extruded the space in between the two circles to half an inch. I did this by clicking the features button and then clicking extrude boss/base. I clicked the space in between the two circles and dragged the arrow up until it reached half an inch.

The next that I did was design the X for the game. To design the X, I first clicked on the "sketch" button. I then used the center rectangle tool to draw a square. The square that I drew was 2.85 inches by 2.85 inches. I then sketched two center lines that both started at one corner and went diagonally across to the other corner. I then used the line tool to draw a line that went about halfway down the square diagonally. I made this line parallel to the center line. Next, I created two more center lines that went down the whole square vertically and horizontally. I then mirrored the solid line around these two center lines. Doing this got me a shape that looked like an X on the square. After that, I clicked on the features button and then clicked on extrude boss/base. I extruded the X shape out to half an inch. If you want your X to have rounded edges, you can fillet them down. You can do this by clicking the features button and then click on fillet. Click on all four of the edges and then fillet them down until you get your X to look the way that you want it to.

The third step that I did in creating this game was designing the board. The first thing I did to design the board was clicking on the sketch tool and then on center point rectangle. Using this tool, I drew a square that was 11.5 inches by 11.5 inches. I then clicked on features and then extrude boss/base. I extruded the square to 1 inch. Then, using the "shell" tool I shelled out the center of the square by 0.20 of an inch. The next thing I did was make lines for the grid of the board. I did this by drawing two center point rectangles horizontally and two vertically. These rectangles have a width of 0.30 inches and a length of 11.10 inches. Also, I made sure that the spaces in between the rectangles were all equal. After drawing the rectangles, I clicked on the features button and then extrude boss/base. I then extruded the rectangles until they were the same height as the outside of the board.

After all of my parts were designed, I wanted to make sure that everything was the right size. Using SOLIDWORKS, I opened an assembly. I put all of my parts into the assembly. I then dragged the X's and O's into the squares on the board. By doing this, I knew everything would fit correctly when the parts were printed out.

The last thing I did was print all of my parts out. To do this, I saved my parts from SOLIDWORKS as an STL. I then put the parts onto the software Matter Control. Using Matter Control, I saved all of my parts onto a flash drive. Then, I used the flash drive to print out the parts using a 3D printer. I printed out 1 board, 5 X's, and 5 O's. After I got the parts printed out, the tic tac toe game was done and ready to be played.