Initial Rubik's Cube design

After deciding to go ahead with the Rubik's cube idea we started putting designs together as to what the cube should look like and what functionalities it should incorporate.

The first challenge was to be able to detect each side's movement. Since I proposed the idea of Rubik's cube I had done some background research as to how this might be achieved. A possible mechanism which we could use is the encoder from a computer mouse. Each side of the cube, when rotated, could in turn rotate the encoder associated with it (image below).

We pitched our concept to Diego and realised that the mechanism need not be so sophisticated. Diego suggested that we could try and use a potentiometer instead. Not only this saved us time on building the mechanism from scratch it also gave us a good starting point since we were easily able to get our hands on a potentiometer, connect it to the Arduino and get some input from it.

Potentiometer, unfortunately, wasn't suitable for our device as it could not be rotated more than a certain degree. For our device we wanted something which could rotate as much as needed so a user isn't required to return a cube's side back to the original state after every move. After some research Madalina found that a rotary encoder would tick all the requirements.

Having decided how we would obtain basic input from the Rubik's cube, we started discussing additional features which should be present in our prototype. Some group members suggested incorporating RGB LED's in each of the smaller 27 cubes. Even though we had some ideas about how we might implement it, the task was quite challenging for a first prototype. So instead we decided to only have one RGB LED per side.
This task was fortunately simplified when Madalina said she found a rotary encoder which is also an RGB LED and a button (image below). So we decided that for our prototype we will use the rotary encoders to detect movement on each side and the RGB LED to display some sort of feedback to the user.