Famous cryptographer’s tombstone cryptogram decrypted
A paper at Schmoocon DC over the weekend revealed a delightful cryptogram on William and Elizebeth Friedmans’ tombstone. Continue reading Famous cryptographer’s tombstone cryptogram decrypted
Category Archives: puzzle
Fancy a T-shirt? Try our New Year’s #sophospuzzle crossword…
If you’re on IT duty over New Year’s – here’s a bit of fun that looks just like real work but isn’t. (Don’t let on that we said so.) Continue reading Fancy a T-shirt? Try our New Year’s #sophospuzzle crossword…
Solving a Rubik’s Cube with Just Two Motors
We’ve all seen videos of Rubik’s cube champions who can solve the puzzle in less than 5 seconds. And there are cube-twisting robots that can solve the cube even faster, often in under a second. This Rubik’s cube solver is not one of those robots, but it’s still pretty cool.
The reason we like Dexter Industries’ “BricKuber” is not for its lightning speed — it takes a minute or two to solve the puzzle. What we like is the simplicity of the approach to manipulating the cube. Built from LEGO parts, including Mindstorms motors and a BrickPi controller, the BricKuber …read more
Continue reading Solving a Rubik’s Cube with Just Two Motors
Solving a Rubik’s Cube with Just Two Motors
We’ve all seen videos of Rubik’s cube champions who can solve the puzzle in less than 5 seconds. And there are cube-twisting robots that can solve the cube even faster, often in under a second. This Rubik’s cube solver is not one of those robots, but it’s still pretty cool.
The reason we like Dexter Industries’ “BricKuber” is not for its lightning speed — it takes a minute or two to solve the puzzle. What we like is the simplicity of the approach to manipulating the cube. Built from LEGO parts, including Mindstorms motors and a BrickPi controller, the BricKuber …read more
Continue reading Solving a Rubik’s Cube with Just Two Motors
Making the Best Plywood for Laser Cut Puzzles
Plywood laser-cuts fairly well but has drawbacks when used in serious production runs, as [Marie] explains in a blog post about a quest for the ultimate laser-cutting plywood. One of the things [Nervous System] makes and sells is generative jigsaw puzzles, and they shared their experience with the challenges in producing them. The biggest issue was the wood itself. They ended up getting a custom plywood made to fit their exact needs, a process that turned out neither as complex nor as unusual as it may sound.
Plywood is great because it’s readily available, but there are some drawbacks that …read more
Continue reading Making the Best Plywood for Laser Cut Puzzles
Your Puzzle’s Done When The Electronics Says So
We can race against the clock when assembling jigsaw puzzles online but what about competing against each other in the real world? [HomeMadeGarbage] came up with the simplest of solutions with his jigsaw puzzle timer that stops only when the puzzle’s completely assembled.
His simple solution was to attach copper foil tape to the back of the pieces, with overlap. He did this in a serpentine pattern to ensure that all pieces had a strip of the tape. The puzzle he used comes with a special container to assemble it in. At two corners of that container, he put two …read more
Continue reading Your Puzzle’s Done When The Electronics Says So
Hack Your Hike with this Arduino Puzzle Geocache
For those who love to hike, no excuse is needed to hit the woods. Other folks, though, need a little coaxing to get into the great outdoors, which is where geocaching comes in: hide something in the woods, post clues to its location online, and they will come. The puzzle is the attraction, and doubly so for this geocache with an Arduino-powered game of Hangman that needs to be solved before the cache is unlocked.
The actual contents of a geocache are rarely the point — after all, it’s the journey, not the destination. But [cliptwings]’ destination is likely to …read more
Continue reading Hack Your Hike with this Arduino Puzzle Geocache
Python Solution To A Snake Cube Puzzle
Puzzles provide many hours of applied fun beyond any perfunctory tasks that occupy our days. When your son or daughter receives a snake cube puzzle as a Christmas gift — and it turns out to be deceptively complex — you can sit there for hours to try to figure out a solution, or use the power of Python to sort out the serpentine conundrum and use brute-force to solve it.
Finding himself in such a scenario, [Randy Nuss] walks us through his solution while giving insight into how he approaches writing code — learning other methods of problem solving can …read more
Solving Hackaday’s Crypto Challenge
Although I’ve been to several DEF CONs over the past few years, I’ve never found time to devote to solving the badge. The legendary status of all the puzzles within are somewhat daunting to me. Likewise, I haven’t yet given DefCon DarkNet a try either — a real shame as the solder-your-own-badge nature of that challenge is right up my alley.
But finally, at the Hackaday SuperCon I finally got my feet wet with the crypto challenge created by [Voja Antonic]. He developed a secondary firmware which anyone could easily flash to their conference badge (it enumerates as a USB …read more
Watch This Robot Solve a Rubik’s Cube in Less Than a Second
The machines want our games as well as our jobs. Continue reading Watch This Robot Solve a Rubik’s Cube in Less Than a Second