After a couple of weeks of working at BarkWeb, Julian presented me with a robot pet project to get stuck into. This involved constructing a robot that could solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle.  The robot I used is called Rippoutai (cube in Japanese). Rippoutai was created and programed to solve the Rubik’s Cube.

To do this I used a Lego Mindstorm ev3 a programmable Lego kit with Lego Mindstorm visual program software which allows the robot to move its motors and scan the cube to solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle. It was a fun and challenging task but I did run into some problems with it.

The first problem I encountered was that the instructions were a little unclear and incorrect. I had to change a couple of bits to get it to work, for example I had to move one of the gears on the RGB scanner to the other side because otherwise it wouldn’t work.

The second problem I discovered was that you weren’t supposed to start with the cube in the scanning bay until it asked you to place it in there and I had tried to run it with the cube in the bay from the start. It would say to remove the cube and when to insert it. When the Rubik’s Cube was placed back on the bay it would start scanning and work properly.

I am very pleased and impressed with how Rippoutai performed and how quickly it solved the cube.

Here is a video of how Rippoutai performed.

Blog post by Aleks Walkuski.