Fast cube solver

[h-g-t]

Don't now if this gas been posted before -

[haydenstudios]

Ah yes, it was posted on The NXT STEP a few days ago, but not here yet. It is indeed very amazing, and I thought that the first Cube Stormer was amazing. And this one depends on a phone for detecting the colors, wheras the other one needed a bulky laptop for computational assistance.

[spillerrec]

It is quite amazing indeed. I did like the Lego camera of the old version, but I guess it might not be good enough.
However I can't stop thinking that it could be improved. It uses about 800 msec to read all the sides of the cube. If multiple cameras had been used to read all sides at the same time, this could mean a 15% speedup. (2 sides at once: 7.5%, 3 sides at once: 10 %)

But it looks nice (like the first CubeStormer), there is even a sticker on the side which looks like an original sticker, but reads "EXTREME CUBESTORMER 2".

So the construction is made of (what I can see):
- 1 Samsung Galaxy S II smart phone
- 4 NXTs
- 12 motors (1 for gripping, 1 for rotating and 1 for the platform (per arm))
- 5 touch sensors (1 for each arm for calibrating rotation + 1 for starting)
- 1 sound sensor (what?), 1 unknown sensor (light/color?) and probably another one in the dead angle. (I suspect that they are only there fore artistic reasons.)
- Mystical blue light.

Anyone got more details on it?

[h-g-t]

Googled cubestormer and got a lot of hits - it seems to be quite famous.

[spillerrec]

Yeah, lots of hits but very little information. Looked at the three first pages and I only found one result useful: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/showt ... rld-record
One of the developers posted it on a speed solving forum. However as it is the guy who wrote the software, it doesn't tell much about the construction. He does say however:

There are two NXT motors rotating each arm and one opening and closing each grip. Mike carefully selected the gear ratio to balance speed and torque.

However since there are only 4 NXT's, this means a max of 12 motors, and by so there are none back to control the platform. Since there are four levers, I assumed a motor was connected to each, however they might just be for decoration. I still don't know where the last motor should come from though.

The average time it takes to solve a cube is still unanswered...