ORBIT Multi-Sensory Planetary Gear Fidget Spinner - Print-in-Place, Braille, Tactile Celestial Caps

This is my first model here! I am fully blind, and most fidget spinners are honestly a bit boring when you cannot see them. So I designed one that is meant to be felt and heard first. ORBIT is a planetary gear fidget spinner where the mechanism itself is the toy: you pinch the stationary centre hub, flick the outer ring, and three planet gears spin and orbit between your fingers while a printed spring ticks against 24 detents inside the rim.

The whole thing is designed in OpenSCAD, which works beautifully with a screen reader, and the full parametric source file is included. There are no bearings, no screws, no glue and no metal anywhere. The gear mechanism prints in place as one piece, and everything prints flat with no supports.

A little solar system for your fingers

The hub cap carries a raised sun with eight rays, and one ray is longer than the others so it works as a tactile pointer. The three planet gears carry swappable press-fit caps with celestial symbols you can tell apart instantly by touch: the moon is a single smooth arc, the comet is a small dome with three streaming tails, and the star is a zigzag ring of five points. A blank spare cap is included, plus an alternate texture set (spiral, rings, radial) in the OpenSCAD source.

The rim carries raised numerals 1, 2 and 3 with matching braille (number sign plus digit), and the grip flutes around the edge pause at each numbered station so you can find them by feel alone. Prefer a silent spinner? Print the spacer version of the spring disc and swap it in seconds by unscrewing the hub cap.

Built so a blind maker can print and assemble it

The whole workflow is non-visual: the hub parts index on a hexagon, the cap screws down like a jar lid, and the planet caps press in with a lead-in taper. The included assembly instructions describe every part and every step by touch - what each piece feels like, which face goes up, and what correct assembly feels like. If you are blind, or you are printing this for a blind child, friend or student, you can build it entirely by feel.

Printing and assembly

Everything prints flat, no supports, standard 0.4 mm nozzle, 0.2 mm layers, PLA. The four fit tolerances were tuned and locked on a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon; a small test plate is included so you can dial in the fits on your printer before committing to the full kit, and every tolerance is a named value in the OpenSCAD Customizer.

The one in the photos is printed extra strong - 6 walls and 100 percent infill - with the spinner in black PLA-CF and white multi-colour braille and numerals. The full infill gives it a lovely dense, heavy feel and real spinning momentum, but normal settings work fine too. Suggested colour plan: dark spinner, silver hub base, gold sun cap, red or orange click spring, white moon, green comet (real comets glow green) and cyan star.

After printing, hold the ring and work the centre sun gear back and forth until the print-in-place gears free up - a brief crackle is normal. Assembly: push the hub stem up through the sun from below until the hexagon indexes, drop the spring disc over it flat face up, screw the cap down snug like a jar lid, and press the celestial caps into the planet sockets. The spinner is about 75 mm across and 21 mm tall assembled.

This is a small toy with small parts - keep it away from young children and anyone who mouths objects.

This is my own original design, and a debut here, so I really hope you like it.

Editing the source

The parametric source needs two things: the free BOSL2 library for OpenSCAD (install it once from the BOSL2 GitHub page), and the braille library file included in the downloads - just keep Custome braille library.scad in the same folder as orbit_spinner.scad and it is found automatically.