Customizable Crystallographic Building Block

This is a structural construction kit.
It uses a natural set of construction blocks which can fill/divide space.

These blocks are based on natural basic crystal structures with high symmetries. This makes the construction kit more direction independent then conventional ones.

User defined blocks:

Generate more building blocks (& couplers bricks) by entering the coordinates of the local nearest neighbours. (Only if the entered nearest neighbours are correctly taken from a proper crystal structure the resulting body will form a solitary space filler.)

A web search revealed this strongly related kit: 
http://www.georgehart.com/rp/FCC.html

Science:

The basic blocks are the Wiegner-Seitz cells of the following crystal lattices
– bcc - body centered cubic
– fcc or ccp - face centered cubic or cubic closed packed
– hcp - hexagonal close packed
some other voroni cells (e.g. one of a diamond atom) are also included

Note the trapezo-rhombic dodecahedron. This one is rarely shown or discusses despite being as fundamental as the rhombic dodecahedron which is widely known.

Future application:

In atomically precise products such blocks can incorporate diverse basic functions and be used as recomposable microcomponents that can form diverse metamaterials.

Choosing these shapes might be desirable because of the ease to reason about them and their good physical properties. E.g. in bcc cells:

Easy reasoning:

• cube faces - cartesian
• octahedral faces - normal to diamond bonds (choosing a main crystal orientation for the housing structure might be sensible)

Good properties:

• not too anisotropic
• edges have no sharp only oblate angles
• surfaces of aggregates form pockets so Van-der-Waals assembly can easily be used (Van-der-Waals forces can be pretty strong - way stronger than most would intuitively expect)

Category: Construction Toys