(2) Research!
After chatting to a few more people, I’ve come up with a lot of general notes.
A lot of these notes include:

• What I might need
• How some things might work, like MCUs on a PCB
• Issues that I might face, like wiring
• Questions that I have that were either clarified within the notes (or not, which I’ll do research on tomorrow!
• And finally, a summarized list of the hardware I might need
  This list is somewhat inaccurate I realize after chatting to more people about what I could potentially do with the LEDs.
  I know I definitely have to get a breadboard and esp32 asap to test the project before creating an actual custom PCB (if time hopefully allows; may need to expedite shipping :( )
  Tomorrow I’ll start a few notes on the LEDs and make a general diagram of what I need, then CAD everything.
  So far, the list is as follows:

• [] CAD
• [] Addressable LEDs (Need to expand on this; in correspondence to the battery and how it connects to the microcontroller)
• [] ESP32/Other MCU (After asking someone I don’t think a Pico 2 could handle this; however, I think it could be used for other features that could potentially expand this project later
• [] Re-chargeable battery (coin batteries probably are too low of a voltage (not powerful enough) to work :( )
  As for software:
• [] Find a way to map the LEDs (more on this tomorrow)
• [] Shuffles for the Rubiks cube (database hopefully)
• [] Controller (via web app or if time allows, a physical controller (?))
  Extras include:
• [] Possible acrylic casing?
• [] Research Adafruit and try to possibly reverse-engineer a few builds.

If anyone has any feedback or thoughts, lmk! I’d appreciate it :D