# BldTrainer, new application for practicing 3-cycles



## JanW (Jun 13, 2016)

*Edit: Removed inactive link and added app as attachment.*

Hello cubers,

here is a little application I made for practicing 3-cycles.

The first time you run it, it will create the textfile BldTrainer.cfg, which is where your settings are saved. Note that if you run it on your C: drive, you might get some error message about not having permission to create this file, so I recommend running the application from some other location.

To use the app, you start with a solved cube and hold it in your default rotation. Top right you can select if you want to practice edges or corners. Click start, or press space bar, there is a short delay for you to get your hands on the cube, then the letter pair for a random 3-cycle is displayed and the timer starts. (Timer running in background, you don't see a running timer.)







Solve the displayed 3-cycle, then press space bar to stop the timer. The cube will update to what it should look like if you solved correctly and your time is displayed.






If you got it correct, leave the cube as it is and press space bar again for next 3-cycle. Continue like this until you get bored, or make a mistake. If you make a mistake and mess up the cube, press reset to start over from a solved cube.

On the right there is a field to select the amount of cycles, in case you want to do more than 1 at a time. Currently anything from 1-8 is supported. It will display the amount of letter pairs you choose, then you can for example memorize them all, close eyes and solve in order. Or you can of course also do sighted solves. It's all up to you how you use it. When you stop timer, the cube will update to what it should look like if all cycles were performed correctly in order.

With the arrow buttons under the cube, you can cycle back through all previous stages of the cube until the last reset. When you cycle back, a letter pair will be displayed on the right of the arrows, the cube will be shown as it was before that letter pair was to be executed, and arrows are drawn on the cube to show how the cycle was supposed to go.






The drop down menu "include" lets you choose a sticker that will be included in every cycle. The selected sticker can appear as first or second target, the other target is random.

In settings you can change rotation of the cube, select your buffers and create your own letter scheme. Every time you change settings, the new settings will be saved as default.

When creating a new letter scheme, it is required that every sticker has a unique letter. You will have to assign some unused letters to the stickers on your buffer, even if you don't need them.

On bottom left you can see your stats for the current session, with average time/3-cycle. At the moment no stats are saved between sessions.

Let me know in this thread if you find any bugs, or if you have any other suggestions for improvements. I might update this application from time to time, but I do not promise very frequent updates. Features I have been thinking about possibly adding in the future:

-support for custom color schemes
-keeping track of stats over time, with more accurate info, such as average times for cycles to different stickers

Enjoy!


----------



## Egide (Jun 14, 2016)

Your app looks really nice, do you plan on making one for mac?


----------



## JanW (Jun 14, 2016)

I'm afraid this is and will remain Windows only, unless someone knows of an easy way to compile Visual Basic code for mac. 

I originally started making this with a much more simple plan in mind, just to make a small app for myself to practice 3-cycles. Didn't consider any cross-platform issues at that point. I chose Visual Basic because I hadn't done any programming in 15 years and it seemed like the easiest language to grasp quickly.


----------



## CxCxC (Jun 14, 2016)

Awesome application BUT I use a 'numbering scheme' for corners : please can you add an option for using numbers instead of letters....it would be awesome if you do so.


----------



## JanW (Jun 14, 2016)

CxCxC said:


> Awesome application BUT I use a 'numbering scheme' for corners : please can you add an option for using numbers instead of letters....it would be awesome if you do so.


It does support numbers (or any other characters), but unfortunately only single characters for each sticker. I guess you would want 1-24, or something like that? Mainly this would require reworking the layout so that there's more room to display letters. And something needs to be done so that you can differentiate 1 11 from 11 1. Currently there is space between letter pairs, with multiple letters I'd need space between letters and some other separator between pairs. This was the main reason I decided against the option to use multiple characters. It keeps the interface cleaner. Otherwise allowing multiple characters shouldn't be a problem, letters are already handled as strings in the code. 

I might consider implementing this at some point.


----------



## y235 (Jun 14, 2016)

JanW said:


> I'm afraid this is and will remain Windows only, unless someone knows of an easy way to compile Visual Basic code for mac.
> 
> I originally started making this with a much more simple plan in mind, just to make a small app for myself to practice 3-cycles. Didn't consider any cross-platform issues at that point. I chose Visual Basic because I hadn't done any programming in 15 years and it seemed like the easiest language to grasp quickly.


It seems like there are some free VB to javascript converters (http://jsil.org/, http://jsc.sourceforge.net/), so maybe you can use them to make it cross-platform (though you'd probably have to make a few changes)


----------



## T1_M0 (Jul 19, 2017)

Amazing tool, started using it!


----------



## pipe01 (Aug 7, 2017)

I know it's old, but you can try using Mono on Mac and Linux.


----------



## abunickabhi (Feb 8, 2019)

pipe01 said:


> I know it's old, but you can try using Mono on Mac and Linux.




Or use wine to run the .exe file in Ubuntu (Linux)


----------

