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)