Designing the core - Part 1

After me and Rupert soldered wires to one of the encoders and received some input from it using the Arduino, Madalina took the kit and soldered wires to rest of the encoders.

The next task was to make a core out of all the encoders which would then go inside the cube. Since it would have been very challenging to make the device wireless in the given time, we decided to put encoders only on 5 sides of the cube and leave one side open for wires to come out and connect to the Arduino. The flip side of this decision is that we can't detect movement from one of the sides, this we decided is an acceptable compromise for a prototype.

We wanted to build the core of our device as close to that of the original cube as possible to later allow us to easily replicate the mechanism of a Rubik's cube. The core is to hold the encoders in place while freely allowing each of the faces to be moved, much like the core of the original Rubik's cube.

In the above image, on the left we have the core of the original Rubik's cube and on the right is the first core made by Madalina using aluminium foil. However the problem with using aluminium, as Madalina pointed out, is that it might interfere with current from the rotary encoder. Nevertheless it was a good starting point.

The next day we went to the workshop to seek advice from one of the technicians about possible ways to design such a core. We got told that we'd have to make a cross, similar to the core of the original Rubik's cube and screw the encoders to it. Me and Madalina thought this was infeasible because we needed the centre of the core to be empty to leave room for wires. So the only other option was to use a small cube, drill holes on each side and attach encoders to it.