Post : 8x8x8 LED cube and the board that drives it
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/11/22/8x8x8-led-cube-and-the-board-that-drives-it/
Posted : November 22, 2012 at 11:01 am
Author : Mike Szczys
Tags : 8x8x8, java, LED cube, shift register, VU meter
Categories : led hacks

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/8x8x8-led-cube.jpg

Check out the LED cube which [Thomas], [Max], and [Felix] put together (http://www.xythobuz.org/index.php?p=cube&lang=en) . But don't forget to look at that beautiful PCB which drives it... nice! But hardware is only part of what goes into a project like this one. After the soldering iron had cooled they kept going and wrote their own software to generate patterns for the three-dimensional display.

Looking at a clean build like this one doesn't drive home the amount of connections one has to make to get everything running. To appreciate it you should take a look at this other 512 LED cube (http://hackaday.com/2011/03/18/512-led-cube-again/) which has its wires showing. You can see from the schematic (available in the project repository (https://github.com/xythobuz/LED-Cube) ) that all of these lines are managed by a series of shift registers. The board itself connects to a computer from which it gets the visualization commands. A Java program they call CubeControl can push letters or turn the cube into a VU meter.

The team built at least two of these. This smaller version uses red LEDs, while the larger one shown in the video after the break has blue ones.

Read more of this post (http://hackaday.com/2012/11/22/8x8x8-led-cube-and-the-board-that-drives-it/#more-90155)

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