HEYKUBE, So Smart It’s Genius

HEYKUBE was inspired by the most frustrating, popular, and compelling puzzle of all time. Two engineers sat down to tackle the question: what’s the best way to teach people to solve the cube, and have fun with it? The answer was HEYKUBE, a cube solver that puts the instructions on the face of the cube. You no longer need to look at separate pattern guides, or your smartphone to solve, everything you need is in HEYKUBE.

David Garrett and Mehdi Hatamian, engineers with decades of experience in the electronics industry, started designing a smart 3x3 cube with a built-in solver as a hobby. It quickly evolved into HEYKUBE — the next generation of smart cubing. HEYKUBE does what no other smart cube can do, puts the solution in your hands and gives you the ability to code and create for HEYKUBE.

The reaction to HEYKUBE has been amazing. For many people, there is the simple joy of seeing HEYKUBE walk you back to a solved state. As you are learning to solve the cube, it is common to make mistakes, HEYKUBE helps you along the solving patterns and gets you back on track without needing to start over. It remembers your moves.

What takes HEYKUBE to the next level is the open programming interface. Using a Raspberry Pi and Python you can program custom instructions and algorithms. If you want to build a better solver, or set up the cube to learn speed-cube patterns, the open API lets you take control. Our goal is to build a community of user-generated content to share and expand the functionality and fun.

Along the way there were some challenging design decisions. How do you put light rings on the faces and track all the moves, while making sure the faces can freely rotate. Even harder, we needed to cram a powerful Bluetooth LE computer, battery, and speaker into the core of the cube, while maintaining the standard size that millions know and love. You’ll have control over the LEDs and sounds, track and pattern-match your moves, and send your own instructions to the HEYKUBE.

HEYKUBE is live on Kickstarter right now, and clicking through to become a backer will bring this toy packed with tech to you. And, what better place than Hackster.io to introduce HEYKUBE and to let the games begin. As part of our kickstarter campaign, we have created a sound contest as a first step into programming for HEYKUBE. Copy our HEYKUBE sounds project from our Hackster page, and see if you can generate your own sounds.

We’ll be watching the community page, and if you post your project with a YouTube video of your sounds, we might pick your sound for HEYKUBE. The music and sounds you create should be anywhere from a short beep to 5-10 seconds long. Think sounds for success, sounds for try again, or sounds for epic fail. We can’t wait to see what you create for this project.

What started as a hobby has grown into a toy that provides a platform for others to create, and that is really beyond our wildest imagination.