Here’s an interesting take on a Lego clock, it uses rotating squares to change the orientation of the black and white tiles to display the needed number. As we see one of the digits cycling to the next number in the video after the break, a couple of different things pop into mind. This seems very much like a 1-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, and it also has a hint of a very large ePaper display. Those use magnetic fields to swivel microspheres that are black on one side and white on the other.

The timepiece, which was built by [Hans Andersson], is limited to displaying numbers only. If you think about it, each row is three pixels but you don’t need to have every combination of those pixels available in order to display the digits. Four sides provide enough room for the necessary combinations. This would not be true if you were trying to scale it up to include all alpha-numeric characters.

The tick of this thing certainly sounds interesting, huh?

[Thanks Michael]

If you’re looking for a piece of custom furniture to anchor your child’s playroom, this Rubik’s cube chest of drawers is just the thing. [Makendo] went the extra couple of miles on the project, building the entire thing from scratch and adding one clever feature after another to make it something special.

It’s made up of three plywood boxes, open on one side to accept a plywood drawer. The drawers were carefully fitted so that it is difficult to see which side is actually the drawer face. [Makendo] even routed a hash-mark of grooves into each face of the cube to make it look like the seams that make up the 9×9 grid of colored squares. Speaking of those colors, the “stickers” themselves are made of 1/4″ plywood and are not permanently affixed. Each is held on with a magnet plus a pair of dowels to keep it from spinning. This way you can rearrange the colors as often as you please.

Each layer of the cube spins thanks to some lazy susan bearings. [Makendo] didn’t want to add too much distance between the different modules so he routed out each side to fit the circular hardware. As a final touch, the drawers themselves can be locked in place using a dowel underneath one of the colored squares. We’ve embedded a video of the cube at play after the break.

[Thanks Karen]

CubeStormer solves Rubik’s cubes and it does it quickly! Made entirely out of LEGO, a Mindstorm web camera is used to scan in the cube with four mechanical hands for manipulation. The device is capable of solving a random cube in less than 11 seconds. That’s quite a bit faster than the last Minstorm solver we saw, and the CuBear solver we are so fond of.

[Thanks Ferdinand]

[Andrius] just sent in his robot Rubik’s cube solver. It isn’t as fast as the solver we saw last year but it also doesn’t require as many parts either.  This project utilizes two claws, each actuated by just two servo motors. The thinking is done by a PC which calculates the necessary moves to solve the cube. Each instruction is then passed via USB to the AVR ATmega16 microcontroller that is responsible for the servo operation.

Right now it looks like the colors for each starting face have to be entered manually before a solution is calculated. We think [Andrius] is probably planning to upgrade this with the next generation of his software as he already has a webcam setup for this type of analysis.

A team of five UC Berkeley engineering built this impressive Rubik’s Cube solver. The CuBear is a giant transparent cube with a servo attached to each face to rotate the cube’s six faces. The user can either scramble the cube using computer controls or show the faces of a scrambled cube to the onboard webcam, and the machine will replicate it. While scrambling the cube may take many moves, the computer calculates the shortest number of moves to solve the cube before proceeding. Team member [Dan Dzoan] is quite a fast solver himself, as you can see at the end of BotJunkie’s video embedded below.