Designing parts for the cube

Having built the core and tested the functionality of the encoders inside it the next step was to build mechanisms which will rotate the encoder when the corresponding side of Rubik's void is rotated. Currently a side of the cube looks like this:

The mechanism will go where the arrow is pointing. Together me, Vlad and Madalina gathered ideas about how to build such a mechanism. Upon taking apart the Rubik's void, I noticed that each small cube on one side of Rubik's void slides along the square below. The arrows indicate the path in which the orange cube can move along.

So our mechanism would need to be attached to the inside of the square (in the ring). We could simply design a circle as shown in the image above however as we can see in figure 1, due to size constraints the encoder comes quite far out of the side. Therefore the circle will need to be really thick. This however creates further problem since the encoder varies in shape along it's height; therefore we needed to design different layers and put them together (image below).

The top-left design is for the top layer, bottom-left design is for the middle layer and the one of the left is for the bottom layer. The reason the top 2 layers are smaller in diameter is because when smaller cubes are moved they slide over a part of the circular hole. We decided to make the above layers using a laser cutter as it's accurate and fast giving us time to perform trial and error. Vlad designed the above layers using Adobe Illustrator and then we used the laser cutter in MVB HCI lab to build them. The material used was acrylic, however due to the shape of each encoder the height of layers was varied. The top and bottom layer was 3mm each where as the middle layer was 5mm.
Once we built the layers we realised that we needed the middle layer to be a bit thicker, but since we didn't have any thicker acrylic sheet we used an additional 3mm layer of the same design. Following is an image of all the layers super-glued together: