Very cool. I remember being the first kid at school to have a Rubiks cube, in the 70s (I read about it in Omni magazine). I had no idea how to solve it. I sent off for a booklet about solving it. I got back a booklet about group theory, far beyond my teenage brain.

I think this is an amazing all around build combining the physical mechanics for solving (a relatively understood problem in rubik's robot solving scene) but along with the graphics integration and some real personality from the bot avatar that gave me quite a few laughs. Well done!

I love how you approached the problem and perfectioned the "product" in all aspects. There's so many playful details that could easily go unnoticed! You're impressively resourceful, and one can tell this was a work of love.

I wish I could buy something like it as a DIY set, just to own it, admire it, show it to people, and have everybody be in awe of your work. What a time to be alive that stuff like this is in reach of a sufficiently dedicated hobbyist!

This makes me want to teleport it back to the 1920s, enclose it in glass and charge people a nickel to use it! You'd be rich!

Can you post the STL files for the shell and Arms?

Great project.

> I'm the creator of SARCASM.

Glad I’m not the only one who sometimes justifies spending time on project purely because of the name I can give to them.

I wonder how many cubes they exploded in the making of that robot

Impressive and a bit mad.

Robotic solver is more of a physical problem than a mental one. A photo of the cube from top and bottom corners and you can solve it in a nanosecond

This is absolutely the most charming thing I've seen in a hot minute.

For anyone also thoroughly enchanted like me, there is an additional, longer demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV52RtuWXk0

Living in software land, I do wonder how hard is the undertaking to build one of my own.

As a hobbyist cuber, this project reeks of icebreaking potential for the rest of the times I'm not actively solving -- leave it on my desk next to a cube... random coworker walks by, sees and grabs the cube, shuffles it, and chucks it into the SARCASM machine, enjoys a minute of novelty, ????, profit!

This is in my mind the hardest part as well.

I can solve the cube with the regular “easy” 3-layer approach, but I’d like to solve it faster.

The issue is that the techniques for fast solving require to learn many different patterns to get to the right solution fast.

I don’t know really how ppl that solve it fast accomplish getting to that level, but to me it would be amazing if i could just set the cube in know scrambled states that let me practice and memorize specific algorithms repeatedly until I learn them.

The problem is that I don’t know enough yet to distinguish which are those initial states, let alone setting the cube in that state, so something that could set it up for me to practice would be amazing

I’m completely not in this space but your comment had me wondering: are there digital cube faces? That is, a real physical cube but with faces that can instantly be set to a given color?

At least until a certain level, scrambling (according to a given "algorithm") is a good way to practice moves. It shouldn't take much longer than a solution either, you are not solving the cube in under 30 moves. And if you don't care about the scramble it's even faster. So I don't think the "way more time" is entirely accurate. It may feel like it though.

Can’t you just run the solving machine in reverse?

I'm looking forward to more genuine people personalities from Unsirious Cybernetics.

The cyclic group generated by e.g. RU has order 105 (so 210 total turns or 105 of each side, alternated). If you have some math know-how, check out [1]. If you don't, take my word for it: when I was a teenager playing around with cubes, I once had a similar experience trying to do the same thing you did - when I went relatively quickly it never returned to the solved state, but when I was very deliberate about each turn, I got the 105 result (not by counting back then, but by rough time estimate given the figure I just looked up). Both you and I probably accidentally threw in one or more double-turns (like a U2) in there, or undercounted and gave up well before the cycle had completed (I, too, had thought I'd made "hundreds" of moves).

[1] https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/4127/algebra-club/rubik-ta... - slide 41

It should take 105 repetitions:

https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?alg=%28U+R%29105

Unless by "same direction" you mean "opposite direction", in which case 63 works:

https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?alg=%28U+R%27%2963

Western cubes always have white opposite yellow. Japanese cubes always have white opposite blue. (The center piece on each side can be considered "fixed" relative to all moves.)