7 ms·
S.A.R.C.A.S.M: Slightly Annoying Rubik's Cube Automatic Solving Machine
- derac 11mo agoThe aesthetics of this are great. Nice job. Demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/Xer4mPZZH8E https://youtube.com/shorts/Xer4mPZZH8E
- boneitis 11mo agoThis 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 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!
- wilg 11mo agoIt's a cool project, but also they're really underselling the amount of work put in to make it annoying.
- chris_overseas 11mo agoThere's a lot more detail describing the project in a couple of forum posts here: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sarcasm-an-over-engineered-rubiks-cube-solving-robot.77338/ https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sarcasm-an-over-eng...
- shmeeed 11mo agoThis is a hot contender for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw On The Internet In 2025. Incredible work!
- stavros 11mo agoThis is fantastic, how did it not get confused by the blue logo on the cube in the video?
- trenchpilgrim 11mo agoWestern 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.)
- stavros 11mo agoAhh right, I forgot the center piece defines the face color, thanks.
- xiaoyu2006 11mo agoI think you built a rubik cube solving machine just to show-case your acronym ;-) Super cool work.
- nneonneo 11mo agoRelated - there's a Guinness record for the fastest Rubik's cube solving robot; it stands at 103 milliseconds: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ue2gZ2vxs48 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ue2gZ2vxs48 https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/News/2025/purdue-ece-students-shatter-guinness-world-record-for-fastest-puzzle-cube-solving-robot https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/News/2025/purdue-ece-stud...
- hammock 11mo agoRobotic 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
- teiferer 11mo agoFirst, you still need to optimize the solution to fit the constraints of mechanical solving. It needs to be as few moves as possible, some of them are parallelizable, etc. Not a trivial problem. Second, nanosecond? You know that a GHz CPU does a single clock tick in one nanosecond, right?
- rossant 11mo agoMaybe there's a new instruction we don't know about in modern CPUs, like RUBIK_SOLVE or something.
- SwiftyBug 11mo agoI mean, we've had RUN_DOOM for many years now, so why not?
- amypetrik8 11mo agoyes, in python either 1) "import doom" or 2) "from rubik import cube"
- Tempest1981 11mo ago
- teunlao 11mo agoSARCASM: the only acronym worth building hardware for
- noman-land 11mo agoI want an automatic scrambling machine, not an automatic solving machine. Two cubes. While you're solving one, the other one is being scrambled. Cubers spend way more time scrambling than solving. Scrambling is the annoying part that needs automating.
- LVB 11mo agoI’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?
- sunnybeetroot 11mo agoThis is a great question! Doesn’t seem like it’d be hard to make if it doesn’t already exist
- apple1417 11mo agoThey exist, but one of the problems is they're not particularly good cubes. While it might help you learn the basics, not being able to handle it like a speedcube means they're probably not going to help you get faster. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l-TWH5W-1fw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l-TWH5W-1fw https://exmarscube.com/product/ex-mars-ai-robot-cube/ https://exmarscube.com/product/ex-mars-ai-robot-cube/ That being said, while looking up those links, I found out that, since I got out of the hobby, smart cubes have become a thing, and are made by real speedcube manufacturers. https://www.gancube.com/products/gan-356-i-carry-smart-magic-cube https://www.gancube.com/products/gan-356-i-carry-smart-magic... This is an easier problem to solve. I'm not sure if you have to solve it first or if it can identify pieces on power up, but after that it's just tracking rotations, which can be done from the (fixed position) centres alone. But if an actual speedcube manufacturer can already fit those electronics in without comprising performance, I can't imagine it's that much harder to fit some addressable LEDs on some slip-ring-esque connections. Must just not be much of a market.
- dullcrisp 11mo agoCan’t you just run the solving machine in reverse?
- optimiz3 11mo agoImpressive work. Curious to how many hours of labor what the development path was. Several man-years possibly?
- dugidugout 11mo agoThe screen ui aestetic and audio (specifically the dubbing) remind me of the silver case series, may be a total reach, nice touches none the less! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Case
- watson 11mo agoThis is one of the best arguments for purchasing a 3D printer
- metalman 11mo agowhats the point? rubicubes are for hoomans got one when I was 12, solved the next day, couldn't tell you how,got better, got fast, got bored, never touched one again. but this much....not knowing and solving as an unconsious process is likely to be the advantage or to put it another way, knowing is limmiting and constrains doing. hooman thing.right
- vindar79 11mo agoHi all. I just found this thread. I'm the creator of SARCASM. Thanks to the OP for sharing. I spent many hours on this build but it was a lot of fun. I'm happy to see that others are enjoying it also :-) If you're interested in the technical side, I wrote detailed posts on the hardware and software on the Teensy forum: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sarcasm-an-over-engineered-rubiks-cube-solving-robot.77338/ https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sarcasm-an-over-eng...
- ewalk153 11mo agoCan you post the STL files for the shell and Arms? Great project.
- vindar79 11mo agoSure. I will add them on github later today. The repo is currently in a very messy state. I would like to clean it and provide detailled assembly steps but I have to much work currently. Hopefully I can do this in a couple of months.
- vindar79 11mo agoDone. Added stl files to the repo.
- scrollaway 11mo ago> 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.
- vindar79 11mo agohehe, it was indeed a major motivation :-)
- ramses0 11mo agoThis 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!
- aEJ04Izw5HYm 11mo agoThe personality of creator really shines through in the software. Douglas Adams would be pleased, I hope loads of hackers will be inspired to make more 'Adamsian' robots.
- moffkalast 11mo agoI'm looking forward to more genuine people personalities from Unsirious Cybernetics.
- zkmon 11mo agoSolving a cube has two parts, determining the moves and making the moves. For humans these two activities happen mostly in parallel. For robots, moves were already determined before the start. So the time taken is merely all about speed of move making.
- klaudioz 11mo agoCool!!, I've created this one 16 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkWLQZgi9uE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkWLQZgi9uE I can see very similar movements this robot is doing compared to my old robot. I really like the screen outputs of it.
- cellular 11mo agoThis looks like a good place to ask HN: I've started with a solved cube, then turned 2 sides sharing an edge, alternatively (same direction) expecting the cube to get messed up but then returning to its solved state. It never got solved! Maybe i didn't do it enough (i did it hundreds of times i think). Has anyone got an explanation?
- rokicki 11mo agoIt should take 105 repetitions: https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?alg=%28U+R%29105 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 https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?alg=%28U+R%27%2963
- JonathanMerklin 11mo agoThe 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-talk2a.pdf https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/4127/algebra-club/rubik-ta... - slide 41
- avandekleut 11mo agoIt takes something like 60 turns or so in my experience. you probably messed up while doing it.
- branon 11mo agoPedantic pet peeve: it'd be S.A.R.C.A.S.M. or SARCASM but not S.A.R.C.A.S.M You are missing the last full stop, unless your project is actually meant to be called "S.A.R.C.A.S. M" An initialism either uses full stops after all letters or none of them.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- slug 11mo agoI built a cubotino a few years ago, similar mechanism, see https://github.com/AndreaFavero71/cubotino https://github.com/AndreaFavero71/cubotino Uses a rpi 2 w, works well, can solve and scramble 3x3x3 cubes, using just 2 servo motors.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bolangi 11mo agoSo does that make the developer a sarcasmaholic? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcOfFeKXcd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcOfFeKXcd4