Building the core - Part 2

Next we needed to decide which ball to use as our core and make some holes in it. I proposed to go with the following ball as it was largest in size (allowing for more space for the encoders and the wires) and was also slightly deformable (with high resilience) which meant it would be easier to make modifications to it further down the line if need be.

First we dissected one side of the sphere to allow for wires to come out from. Then after quickly getting trained to use the drill machines in the workshop, me and Madalina made 5 more holes in the sphere. Since our calculations weren't precise the holes were misaligned and I was quite concerned about this. However, the sphere was made out of easily deformable material, therefore I decided to let go of it for now and make modifications to it later when building the cube on top of the core. That way I will know precisely where the holes need to be. Below is the image of our core after Madalina fitted all the encoders inside it:

The next task was to connect all the encoders to the Arduino. We had 40 (5 x 8 ) wires to connect, however the Arduino we had been provided with only had 13 ports. After Vlad borrowed a bigger Arduino, Madalina spent few hours connecting all the wires and writing a program to communicate with all 5 rotary encoders, their RGB LED's and their push buttons. Below is an image of the core fully connected to the Arduino: