Thursday, May 26, 2011

First attempt, soldering together an LED cube 3x3x3

I started working on my first LED cube, to keep it simple I'm starting with a very basic 3x3x3 LED cube that can be controlled from an Arduino UNO.  From what I've read you can do a 5x5x5 LED cube with an arduino before you have to switch over to an ATmel chip which is a little over my head at this point, but I'm working toward being able to pull off an 8x8x8 RGB LED cube.  Still, since I'm just starting electronics it's all baby steps at this point. 

Here are my 3 layers, tonight I'll solder them together and have the led cube put all together.  I burned up a few LED's during the soldering that I had to unsolder and replace, but now I've got 3 working layers.  Then I'll mount it on a protoboard and begin adding the resistors and transistors and a header to plug the Arduino into.  I read a really interesting article on Instructables about building/bending lexan for electronics enclosures which might be a nice touch once I have a cube I want to finalize.  This first one is just a test so I can figure out all the theory behind these things and figure out a better way keep my LED's aligned properly since once you get up to 5x5x5 it looks pretty lame if LED's aren't in a perfectly square grid for persistence of vision tricks.

1 comment:

  1. I'm always surprised at how many hits this page gets. I've got a friend I was showing a 4x4x4 LED cube to and he really wants me to show him how to build one. I'm thinking if he is really interested I'll try to document the whole process and tricks I've learned along the way and actually create a guide with tips for each stage of the build and finally using an Arduino UNO to run the whole thing.

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