Tag Archives: LEGO Mindstorms EV3

LEGO Robot Breaks the World Record at Solving Rubik’s Cube

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LEGO Robot Rubik's Cube

LEGO bricks and robots are only a few of a geek’s favorite things, so any projects bringing them together is bound to be successful, especially if involves breaking a world record.

CubeStormer 3, as this LEGO robot is known as, can solve Rubik’s cube in 3.253 seconds. Any way you look at it, that’s a great improvement over the previous record of 5.27 seconds. Ironically enough, that was established by the same team that built this robot using its predecessor, CubeStormer 2.

Inventors Mike Dobson and David Gilday exhibited their creation at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, England, and they also demonstrated how incredibly quick the LEGO Mindstorms robot is at solving Rubik’s cube. Gilday explained that “Our real focus is to demonstrate what can be achieved with readily available technology to inspire young minds into taking a greater interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

By “readily available technology,” Gilday refers to the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone that provided the robot the brains necessary for breaking the world record. If the inventors are going down that path, I assume that the next world record will be established using a Samsung Galaxy S5. The two developers also used ARM-processors in tandem with the Galaxy S4. More precisely, the smartphone analyzed the cube using a custom Android app and determined how many moves the robot should make to solve the puzzle. The ARM processors, on the other hand, were in charge of moving the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 bricks according to the solution dictated by the Galaxy S4.

Gilday also pointed out that “We knew CubeStormer 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there’s always an element of risk. Our big challenge now is working out if it’s possible to make it go even faster.”

Watch the following video to witness CubeStormer 3 solving the puzzle in record time. It’s quite needless to say that the video, despite being very short, is very impressive. The current record will be really hard to beat, even for this team of inventors, but that doesn’t meant that they shouldn’t use their creativity at something else, especially if it’s based on LEGO and robots, again.

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Braigo Budget Braille Printer Is Made of LEGO

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LEGO Braille Printer 2

What is more impressive, the fact that this low-cost Braille printer was built using mostly LEGO, or that the project was made by a 12-year old? Answering this question might prove very difficult.

Shubham Banerjee, the Californian seventh grader who invented the LEGO Braille printer, most probably didn’t mean to become famous after finishing this science fair project. Still, the fact that someone decided at such an early age to create something that could have a significant impact on the lives of several million people is definitely not your everyday news. Given the main components of this Braille printer, namely the LEGO bricks, it should not come as a surprise that Shubham’s project is very budget-friendly.

More precisely, Shubham put together this Braille printer using only a $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and hardware from Home Depot that only cost him a few dollars. Braigo, as he named the device, is based on the blueprints of a real Braille printer, but the software and the hardware were radically changed, while the function of printing Braille letters was successfully maintained.

Braigo’s controller scrolls through the alphabet and prints the desired letters on calculator paper, so even the consumables are cheap with this LEGO Braille printer. The prototype is rather slow, but Shubham intends to improve it so that it ends up printing entire pages in Braille.

Considering that Braille printers can cost upwards of $2,000, Shubham’s solution is a lot more cost-efficient, not to mention a lot easier to build and use. Watch the following video to get an idea about how Braigo looks and works in a real life scenario.

If you’re wondering what will happen to this project in the future, you might be surprised by the answer. Shubham doesn’t want to mass produce this in order to become a millionaire. Instead, he claims that Braigo will be an open-source project that anyone can change and improve according to his needs and wishes. The capabilities of Braigo could be furthermore extended by making changes to the software that this printer’s controller uses. The project itself is nothing short of amazing, and it’s great to see that some young geniuses are concerned about the fate of the disadvantaged.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Arianna app that uses haptic feedback to create a virtual cane for the blind or the world’s first Braille smartphone.