Public Rubik's cube solving machine designed in OnShape

thibault_grad · April 2020

Hi Onshape community.

Here’s a post to talk about a Rubik’s cube solving machine completely designed in OnShape.

This machine is called the BallCuber and can solve the Revenge cube (4x4x4). It is patented and mainly made of 3D printed parts and stepper motors.

We (my friend @Rufus31415 and I) began this project about 2 years ago and we directly chose OnShape platform to design it. At the time we begun, we were living in separate areas of France. Onshape cloud platform gave us the tool we needed to access up to date 3D models and be able to have real time collaboration (screen sharing was a huge +).

We then printed our first prototype which wasn’t really successful by the way, but we learned a lot. At this step of the project, we enjoyed another very important feature about OnShape, unlimited undos, branching and merging.

Coming from Creo I had really hard time to change my designs to explore new solution because I knew it wasn’t that easy to go back to the previous versions if I realized the new solution wasn’t good. With OnShape there's no such questioning as we always have unlimited undos and we can always compare new solution to a previous one (we can even branch easily from a previous state of the design). Coming from the CAD environment I didn't know a lot about branching and merging but my teammate coming from software development knew about it. That is the time where I discovered the power of branching and merging ! I honestly think every desktop based CAD software users should give it a try and discover how amazing it is.

There are many other features we loved with OnShape. The configurations are a great tool and better managed than on desktop CAD software.

As we were prototyping we changed the design, reprint some parts but not the others, so being able to have previous and new versions of the parts in the same assembly was a big plus to always have the Release branch main assembly that reflects the actual real prototype.

Another very cool feature is the mobile app that we used a lot to see the changes the teammate have just done without opening the laptop. It is very comfy and natural to visualize 3D model on the app. The ability to do little changes is plus but it is hard to edit complex stuff.

The mate connectors are very handy to use and our model is fully movable (except the cams that are very hard to model) at the cost of a very small amount of effort.

We also tried to play with REST API which is very nice. We built a very simple hololens app for Onshape. I already talked about it in a previous post.

And I forgot to talk about other features we loved, Part studios with multi part modelling makes designing with having good design intent is much easier. In context editing was very handy sometimes too because it is stable and doesn’t break when you move a part.

Thank you OnShape team to bring us those tools.

Please visit our website for details, videos, 3D model (in AR) : https://ballcuber.github.io/

The public BallCuber document : https://cad.onshape.com/documents/0cc05df50afa7069d40d5b29/w/4e9a02bde82a52420bb553ee/e/6d739c0ee09a45d88f809d15

Here is the revision graph of the cuber