This Beautiful Jigsaw Puzzle Lights Up When You Correctly Place a Piece

Jigsaw puzzles date back to around 1760, when cartographer and engraver John Spilsbury began creating puzzles using a marquetry saw (not a jigsaw). Those early puzzles, which Spilsbury called "dissected maps," were cut to match the content. For example, cuts might follow the borders of countries. Eventually those evolved into the quintessential jigsaw puzzle piece shapes that we still see today. Nadieh Bremer wanted to take jigsaw puzzles beyond those standard shapes. She created this beautiful spirograph jigsaw puzzle, called Nova, with unique piece shapes that lights up when you correctly place a piece.

A spirograph is a device that generates mathematical geometric drawings. You would recognize a spirograph drawing by its smooth, curved lines that form intricate geometric patterns. Bremer cut this puzzle's pieces along similar lines. Each piece is 5mm thick laser-cut acrylic that is a semi-translucent white. That allows light to shine through each piece. When you first place a piece in the correct location, a splash of light shoots out from the piece. The rest of the time, gently-pulsing light shines from underneath all of the pieces that are where they should be. The result is all the relaxation of working on a jigsaw puzzle with the added visual appeal of soothing lighting effects.

In order for the puzzle to react to the presence of the pieces, it needs to have the ability to identify each piece. Instead of going with something like RFID, Bremer took a page from history and followed a methodology similar to the electromechanical devices of yore. Each puzzle piece has a small piece of copper foil on its underside. That foil touches contact points on the board, which completes a circuit and tells the microcontroller that the corresponding location has a piece. The unique shapes of the pieces and the placement of the contacts ensure that only the correct piece can complete the circuit.

A Microchip ATtiny3216 microcontroller monitors the contact points through PCAA9555D I2C GPIO expanders. The lighting comes from WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs. Bremer spent most of her time on the intricate design work. She modeled the enclosure and puzzles pieces in Autodesk Fusion 360. She then fabricated most of the parts on a laser cutter. The quality of her work is obvious after one look at the puzzle.

This is, of course, a very expensive way to make a puzzle. But the cool thing is that the board with the contact points and the puzzles pieces could be swapped out at a relatively low cost. We could certainly imagine Bremer launching Nova through Kickstarter.