Realtime 3D Rubik’s Cube State Tracker & Solver

In our final project, we built a real-time 3D Rubik’s Cube tracker and solver on the RP2040, using TRIAD to estimate orientation from IMU and magnetometer measurements. The cube is rendered live in 3D on a VGA display, face colors are entered via buttons, and the computed solution is presented step-by-step on the same VGA interface.

TRIAD rotation matrix VGA 3D rendering UI state machine IDDFS solver

Team & Deliverables

Team

Jeongyoon Rhee (jr2487), Tianyi Liu (tl955)

Course

Cornell ECE 5730

📄 Final Report (PDF)report.pdf ⬇️ Download Code (ZIP)jr2487_tl955_code.zip 🎥 Demo Video (YouTube)youtube.com

Contents

1) Project Overview

Goal, system workflow, and the overall demo structure (includes system figure).

2) Background Math (TRIAD)

How we compute the rotation matrix Q from accel + magnetometer vectors.

3) Software Design

Dual-core architecture, rendering pipeline, solver execution, and UI state machine.

4) Hardware Design

RP2040 + MPU6050 + GY271 + button module + magnetic fixture (with diagrams).

Screenshots of start state, face input UI, and step-by-step solving playback.

6) Unsuccessful Attempts

Sixth-face inference, Euler-angle approach instability, Kociemba constraints.

Quick Visual

Demo video (embedded).

Demo video (YouTube) — xEEFOJA4oqk

System snapshot

MCU

RP2040 (dual-core)

Sensors

MPU6050 + GY271

Estimator

TRIAD rotation matrix

Display

VGA (live 3D cube + UI + solution playback)

Solver

IDDFS (constrained move set)