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Having spent a winter or two during my youth in the 1980’s trying — mostly unsuccessfully — to solve that brightly-colored bundle of endless frustration and obsession known as the Rubik’s Cube, I eventually gave up and moved on to other puzzling pursuits. Frustration with inanimate objects becomes me, I guess.

Close to 20 years later, JP Brown has managed to create arguably one of the most impressive Mindstorms creations ever — an RCX-powered Rubik’s Cube solver. Using a pair of RCX units, a Mindstorms Vision Command camera, a few grabber arms and an extensive amount of custom programming, Brown’s creation can methodically grasp and turn the cube until it is solved.

As he explains on his website, Brown admits that one of the more time-consuming aspects of the project was writing the color recognition software that helped determine which way the grabber arms needed to move. Working in conjunction with the color recognition software is the 3×3 Rubik’s Cube solver code (adapted from some existing code) that is based on a cube-solving solution developed by Herbert Kociemba.

A project page on Brown’s site provides a detailed overview of the project, including code downloads and other details. (Source: JP Brown, images copyright JP Brown) – [Jeff James]

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Mindstorms (1.0-2.0), Mindstorms programming, RCX old school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.