implementation program of led cube 8x8x8 running

After spending a week trying to fit the cube onto the PCB, I gave up and decided to simply build a new cube directly on the PCB. The layers were then assembled and soldered by hand with the help of a 3D printed spacer.Īfter constructing the first revision of the cube, I discovered a major problem: since I got the PCB in a week after finishing the first cube, inserting the LED cube onto the PCB was pretty much impossible (trying to fit 192 leads of the same length through a PCB at the same time is harder than it looks). To make things easier and more consistent, I 3D printed a few tools to help with bending the leads and trimming them to the correct lengths. This involved bending the leads in four different orientations to allow the layers to stack in such a way that is structurally sound in all directions.

To achieve this, I designed the first revision of the cube in such a way that no extra wiring was used outside of the leads from the LEDs themselves. With such a large cube, obstructions within the cube must be minimized to allow the LEDs at the back and center to be visible. * – There’s actually a notable difference when driving the cube at 60Hz vs 240Hz. While the cube itself isn’t limited to a specific microcontroller, by using this board I can write a baseline for the code from which other students can then easily build off of. This meant that it had to be driven from a Digilent Cerebot 32MX7 board that is used to teach microprocessors here at Virginia Tech. It had to be driven from a microcontroller that is used in introductory classes.Since some sort of multiplexing would be needed to drive 512 LEDs, I wanted the cube to have at least 240Hz* refresh rate at the very minimum. This meant that the overall cube should be structurally sound and a proper PCB should be designed for the driving circuitry. Instead of something shoddily put together, I wanted to build a display that could be put outside of one of the introductory lab rooms for other students to program and play around with.

After looking up some designs online of what others have built, I decided to design and build my own version.

One of the projects that I’ve been working on for the last four months or so is an 8x8x8 RGB LED cube. – Added support for controllers as well as Snake and Tron game modes

Implementation program of led cube 8x8x8 running