Rubik's Cube Solving Robot

This repository is for a robot that solves the rubik's cube. The idea is that after a scrambled rubik's cube has been places in the robot, an ESP32 (master) gets the cube's state (using 2 cameras, looking at opposite corners, each seeing 3 faces). The data is then sent to a more powerful computer (slave) which puts the data through kociemba's algorithm. The solution is then sent back to the master for servos to execute and (hopefully) solve the cube.

Master-Slave Relationship

The data is sent through the default UART connection between the master and the slave in the simple RCTP protocol (Rubik's Cube Transfer Protocol) (see include/rctp.h) (Note that both machines have to have the same endianess since the protocol is binary)

Building

The projects can all be built separately, but only the implementation of kociemba's algorithm (kociemba/) can be useful on its own.

• kociemba/: built using GNU make (kociemba/README.md for more details)

• slave/: built using GNU make (slave/README.md for more details)

• master/: in contrast with the other parts, the master is built usingesp-idf's build system (master/README.md for more details)

The Makfile in the root of this repo is a wrapper around the other build systems, so just use:

• make all/kociemba/slave/master to build all or a single one (with nondebug flags)

• make run [FLASH=1] [PORT=ttyUSBn] to build and run the slave, and when FLASH is set the master program is flashed, and when PORT is set, the given port is tried instead of the default ttyUSB0

Note that building master/ using the wrapper requires the esp-idf export script to be sourced.

References

• http://kociemba.org/cube.htm
• https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/index.html