The Uncertain 7-Cube

Pages
Contributors: Nick Poole
Favorited Favorite 3

The Build

The Uncertain 7-Cube was supposed to be about the size of a Magic 8-Ball except, you know, cube shaped. The way this was accomplished is that almost all of the component boards were mounted vertically on a 2” square ProtoBoard using right-angle headers. This kept everything mounted firmly to the cube and left room in the center for a battery.

buildpic

As you can see, there’s a ribbon cable attached to the FTDI header on the Arduino Pro Mini. That’s just there to allow the Arduino to be programmed after the whole thing is enclosed. The headphone jack on the Text-to-Speech module, the charging jack on the Powercell and the FTDI ribbon are all accessible from one side of the assembly; That way, I could avoid taking the whole enclosure apart if I needed to get to something.

The only part that isn’t mounted vertically is the Wake-on-Shake board. Since it uses an accelerometer to detect when it changes position, it needs to be firmly connected to the board so it can’t wiggle around and decrease the reliability of the sensor. You’ll also notice the speaker is just hanging off of the board. When everything is mounted in the enclosure, the standoffs keep the speaker from moving.