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LED Rubik’s cube

Hoolaput | July 8th, 2008
Illustration

I am fascinated by LEDs they are so small and yet they give off a great amount of light in a variety of colours. I am also fascinated by an old puzzle called the Rubik’s cube. Why not combine the two and make an LED Rubik’s cube. It will be a challenge giving power to all the LEDs and yet they can be easily turned and rotated. I bet there’s some geniuses out there that can do it (kipkay).

5 COMMENTS on “LED Rubik’s cube”

  1. Stephen H | July 9th, 2008 12:10 pm

    Probably the best way to tackle this would be to start with the power source at the center, and using metal contacts not wires to transfer the juice that way it can still be rotating freely without snapping wires, the problem with this is that A) the connection will be broken so the lights will go off when its not in a perfect cube shape B) rubbing the contacts over and over while exposing them to air is just asking for oxidation (rust,corrosion). if you put a small battery in each of the center colors and made the contacts only for the face it touches making only a couple lights go out when a side is changed, but this doesnt fix the other problem.

    If you ran mutiple circuits (stay with me here) inside each cube (smaller parts) that when broken would still give power via the second face’s circuit then they would all stay on, but this wont fix the oxidation, and the cube will get hot after a while of being plugged in.

  2. Nitrox027 | July 9th, 2008 4:25 pm

    to do this you should use a dice rubik’s cube made from see-through dice

  3. Grey | July 10th, 2008 2:14 am

    I think he means having different colored LEDs for each of the face colors.

    It’d probably have to be a bit large than standardto fit all the circuitry. But if you had the right sized cubes, you could probably use a very small battery in each cube.

    The real trick would be to make a seperate circuit for each face cube that was self powered and maybe motion activated. Maybe with a tiny time switch, so it turned off after like 30secs of inactivity. That would save the trouble of figuring out how to turn the whole thing on, and it would save batteries, since you couldn’t forget to kill it. Probably be very hard, and none to cheap to do. I don’t know that much about control systems.

    Replacing batteries would be a real pain, when they died, though.

  4. Jason | July 11th, 2008 12:47 pm

    Or you could always make it not move and make the outer cubes push buttons that act as movement and create software that displays the color based on what is supposed to be displayed. OLED Rubiks Cube???

  5. kieran | July 26th, 2008 2:25 pm

    i going to addon a little bit about what stephen said what you should do is have a sperate battery in each cube. Then you should have some contacts on the side of the squares and for each colour bulb you have the contacts in a different area so they only light up when the come in contacts with one of the same colour.

    i did propare a diagram but i dont know how to link it.

    i think this is a good idea from me concidering im only 13 XD

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