LEGO® Megaminxer
The Megaminx puzzle is a dodecahedron with 12 faces, each with 5 edges, that can be rotated in a similar way to the well-known Rubik's Cube puzzle.
The Megaminx puzzle is a dodecahedron with 12 faces, each with 5 edges, that can be rotated in a similar way to the well-known Rubik's Cube puzzle.
Megaminxer is possibly the first robot in the world to solve a Megaminx puzzle.
The robot itself is built entirely out of LEGO including a Mindstorms NXT kit with the addition of an HTC Desire smartphone running a custom Android app. 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.
The mechanism used by Megaminxer has been adapted from my "MultiCuber" robot designs that can be seen in other videos solving cube shaped Rubik's Cube style puzzles from 2x2x2 up to 7x7x7.
The most interesting 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.
