A proof-of-concept proposal for turning standard Rubik's Cubes into smartcubes by embedding speakers into the cube's centercaps.
D.I.Y. Smartcube was created as part of Joseph Hale's undergraduate honors thesis in Software Engineering for Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University from Spring 2020 through Spring 2022.
Speedsolving, the art of solving twisty puzzles like the Rubik's Cube as fast as possible, has recently benefitted from the arrival of smartcubes which have special hardware for tracking the cube's face turns and transmitting them via Bluetooth. However, due to their embedded electronics, existing smartcubes cannot be used in competition, reducing their utility in personal speedcubing practice.
This thesis proposes a sound-based design for tracking the face turns of a standard, non-smart speedcube consisting of an audio processing receiver in software and a small physical speaker configured as a transmitter. Special attention has been given to ensuring that installing the transmitter requires only a reversible centercap replacement on the original cube. This allows the cube to benefit from smartcube features during practice, while still maintaining compliance with competition regulations.
Within a controlled test environment, the software receiver perfectly detected a variety of transmitted move sequences. Furthermore, all components required for the physical transmitter were demonstrated to fit within the centercap of a Gans 356 speedcube.
This repository has a LOT of information at varying levels of complexity. I recommend reading the contents of this repository in the following order:
- The Summary Posterboard (1 page) used to explain the core concepts of the D.I.Y. Smartcube at an academic poster session.
- The Defense Presentation (30 slides + commentary) used to provide a detailed overview of the proposal in my Honors Thesis Defense.
- The Thesis Document (98 pages) containing the full proposal including requirements, designs, specifications, and examples.
Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Joseph Hale, All Rights Reserved
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I believe that an open-source software license should ensure that code can be used everywhere.
Strict copyleft licenses, like the GPL family of licenses, fail to fulfill that vision because they only permit code to be used in other GPL-licensed projects. Permissive licenses, like the MIT and Apache licenses, allow code to be used everywhere but fail to prevent proprietary or GPL-licensed projects from limiting access to any improvements they make.
In contrast, the MPL-2.0 license allows code to be used in any software project, while ensuring that any improvements remain available for everyone.