Khối Ghép Mô-đun Mê Cung Chuột (Rat Maze) & Connector

A young family member has a growing number of rats as pets. For a birthday present I am printing off 110 blocks that can be used to create complex and varied mazes for the rats to explore and learn; ending in a feeding block as reward! I know the entire family is going to love building rat mazes from these modular blocks.

THE MAZE
The blocks are 100mmX100mmX100mm squares with 75mm round openings for the animals to go from chamber to chamber. The blocks all have 80mm square chambers to provide sufficient space for the animals to turn around or undertake a 90 degree turn with ease. There are four distinct blocks used in the maze design:

Dead End (including a Feeding Station)
Turn (can be oriented as a left or right turn)
T Junction (can be orientated and a straight with a right or with a left turn)
Straight (a straight through pathway)

The blocks have viewing/lighting slots cut into the roof that follow the direction of travel except for the DEAD END blocs (refer later).

I have researched random maze 10X10 generators online and a combination that fits almost all designs is:

60 Turn Blocks
30 Straight Section Blocks
10 T Junction Blocks
10 Dead End Blocks (including one feeding station)

Requiring 110 blocks in total that allow for a massive variety of 10 X 10 maze designs with footprint 1m X 1m that will fit many tables or take up limited space on the floor.

CONNECTORS
I spent many attempts at fashioning connectors and settled on the V3 ones uploaded here. The connectors all fit nicely into the pipe and channel cut into the maze blocks at each corner. You can move many joined blocks at a time by holding just one using the designed connectors. There are three connectors included:

2 Block Connector (for edging blocks or along side runs)
3 Block Connector (To start a side spur run)
4 Block Connector (the main connector used in square or rectangular maze designs)

With a rectangular or square maze only the 2 block and 4 block connectors are needed. The 3 block is for tying in any side spur passages built onto a maze.

FEEDING STATION
An individual feeding station is included which I have printed myself in red PLA, all other blocks have been printed in black PLA. I have included in the feeding station a seesaw feeding box (rockers printed and glued) with a mast and mascot that will move to signify when an animal arrives at the feeding point. The mascot to your own selection or design needs a 6.3mm to 6.4mm mounting hole to snugly fit the 6mm mast. The mast and mascot (not included)  is printed with solid fill.

DEAD END BLOCKS
The more dead ends then the more challenging the maze should be for animals to learn. I have included two designs for the terminating block, one with a round opening similar to all the other blocks and one with a square opening. the square opening block will accommodate rechargeable <81mm wide square or <84mm wide round PIR lights which will add a visual effect when an animal approaches that each dead end; making progress tracking more easy and fun.  The light block also has a small hole at the rear to make removal of the PIR light easier to push out for recharging.

SCALABILITY
The blocks are suited to quite large rodents providing sufficient room to turn around. It can be scaled down to accommodate smaller mice or rats. The connectors however will not scale and be useable. They are a snug fit which will only get tighter as the scale of block is reduced or looser if the scale was enlarged. For mice, a 50% block scale would be fine and new connectors would need to be made. The original hole is 7.5mm and 20mm deep. The cross member is 2.75mmX15mmX9mm sat in a 4mm cutting running from post centre to post centre. The connector pins are 7.1mm by 19mm deep. The 0.4mm tolerance leaves a nice snug fit so if the blocks were reduced by 50% I would make connectors with pin size 3.4mm, 9mm deep and cross member 1.25mm.

PRINTING
I used standard PLA printing, 0.2mm layers for all parts except the connectors that were printed in 0.1mm layers. To speed up printing then 0.3mm layer on a 0.4mm nozzle will be fine although rounding of the openings will become less smooth.

For block printing supports are required. I lowered the density to 15% to reduce the filament consumption and also make the removal easier. There are a lot of roof supports to clear.

For the connectors I used SOLID INFILL, definitely a must to minimise the chance of snapping connectors in the box.

At full scale default 15% infill each block required 150g - 225g of filament so to do a full maze set print of 110 blocks will require around 18kg of filament. If scaling down to say 50% for smaller animals then the filament usage would be around 5kg but new connectors would need generating. On a 220mm plate you are restricted to two block per plate to allow for supports. A marginally larger plate will enable 4 block printing at a time.