Rubik's Cube ... Sphere

Hooray! Images from the Rubik's Cube project!

After many days of hard work from the team I am in we have finally completed the chassis for the solver, which will hold the cube, actuators and any electronics required. The idea when designing this chassis was to make the actuator mounts (these are the large empty boxes) as flexible as possible - meaning that we can build and test other subsystems (like cameras) before the motors and gearboxes are ready.

A quick note, this is my EEE degree's third year group project. Seeing that we are third years the project supervisor has decided to make things slightly harder - all communication to the chassis mounted electronics (and motors) has to be done via an audio cable, and we are not allowed programmable devices to decode the information from the cable. The team's solution to this involves a PC soundcard, lots of bandpass filters and a couple of basic ADCs to implement a simple analogue shift keying communication scheme with multiple sub channels separated in the frequency domain. The lack of programmable logic has left us having to control the actuating servos with one-hot logic, which slows down our solving speed considerably.

The cube sphere!

Three years of Engineering education put to good use in finding a way to hold the cube in place for camera testing. (Hot glue was also used)

GrAVITAS - the circuit board

Ha! 

GrAVITAS returns - a bit worse for wear (having been stored in carbonite for so long). Work has finally got manageable enough for me to return to work on the solar flare detector. Actually, I lie - there were a couple of brilliant team members who persisted with their task, even when I went quiet on the subject, who galvanised me into action.

So, the progress:

1. Much software doings, it is only the scheduling and reporting that needs to be done. Having said that I have discovered (from other similar projects on the web) that NOAA publish the information from GOES-15's solar instruments, which would be brilliant to compare with the data we capture - and could be used entirely automatically.

2.I finally got around to the hardware, and have now planned out the analogue signal chain. Luckily due to the audio card digitising the signal, it does not have to be too complicated. A couple of buffers, amplifiers, a notch filter and a bandpass filter and everything is awesome! Needless to say, I expect the receiver to work terribly in this first iteration, but maybe by the fifth.... I think that while the design below does not include them I may end up adding a load of potentiometers in the place of some of the resistors to allow me to bodge optimise the circuit parameters!

My planned matrix board layout for the analogue signal chain. All go for soldering up on Thursday.

Hopefully I can post soon about even more progress, but I expect that my targets may slip - we have another Blake Project presentation opportunity this weekend which may eat a lot of time.