If you are LEGO lover, you sure surprise on this, they are so professional to play the LEGO. If you are Android supporter you will surprise too, wow, I can’t expect that my phone can do so much of functions. They combine of Android phone, Lego to build up the Megaminxer.
Megaminxer is probably the first robot in the world to solve a Megaminx puzzle.
The Megaminx is a dodecahedron with 12 faces, each with 5 edges. Each face can be rotated in a similar way to the well-known Rubik’s Cube puzzle.
The robot itself is built out of LEGO using a Mindstorms NXT kit for driving the mechanics. An HTC Desire smartphone running a custom Android app is the brain of the solver. The app uses the phone’s camera to capture images of each face of the Megaminx which it then processes to determine the colors of the scrambled puzzle. After working out the solution, the app transmits the moves to the NXT controller via bluetooth to instruct it to solve the Magaminx.
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The mechanism used by Megaminxer has been adapted from the “MultiCuber” robot designs as seen in MultiCuber 777
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The most challenging parts of the mechanical design were creating pentagonal shaped rings and modifying the tilting mechanism to cope with the obtuse angles between edges and faces using LEGO bricks that more naturally form shapes with right angles.
The software uses an enhanced table-driven algorithm developed from one previously created for solving the standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube puzzle.