Master Piece: Lego Rubik's Cube Solver

For our final high school project, I made a Rubik's Cube Solver using Lego, together with a classmate.

We found a website that simply broke down the solving process into looking at certain squares and then performing certain steps to get to the next phase. We then simply programmed this exact process in Lego Mindstorms. For the robot design we eyeballed some youtube videos and copied the designs from those. In the end, the robot would work only partially, because the motors were too imprecise for how we used them, and the Rubik's Cube would get stuck after a while. However, by lining up the cube and the motors again, and resetting the program, eventually a Rubik's Cube could be solved.

We had a chance to be nominated for a Van Melsenprijs, but unfortunately we ran into the problems mentioned above late in the project, and we were not able to fix these problems in time for the contest.

In hindsight this was a defining project for me personally. It was the first time I ever programmed something. We simply used Lego Mindstorms Block Code, but still it made me enthousiastic about programming, and eventually led me to study Computer Science!

Gallery

Bonus

At the end of high school we made two kinds of so called "master pieces". One was more science oriented, for which clearly this Lego Rubik's Cube Solver was made. The other master piece was Arts focussed. For that, I made this Golden Fish! 🐠 😃