8x8x8 RGB LED Cube
Probably everybody likes LED cubes. The have lots of blinky capabilities, a nice symmetry (Platonic solids are always a good point to start with a 3D shape I think), and also look nice in general. There is just on caveat, which is, that there is a lot of soldering work to to. However this can be something good if winter time is coming, outside it's cold and rainy and you your day-job includes lot of thinking, and you therefore want to do something really stupid and repetitive in the evening. If that's the case I recommend to solder a LED-Cube.
512 RGB Leds -> Lots of soldering work to do.
Some fixture to hold the LEDs during solder time. The wooden rods are fixed with the right spacing to serve as reference for the placement of the single 8-LED columns. First the columns have been soldered, then in this step they are combined to planes.
In the next step we're going 3D and the planes are combined one after another to get the cube. This is the most complicated step, since you have to somehow solder the layers to the wires that go along the third dimension without bending them to much so they still look nice and not too wavy and wrinkled.
The final result.
As a base I added strips of 50mm x 1mm aluminium in between the layers (the spacing of my LEDS is 50 mm in all dimensions). Everything is then glued from below to get a 400mm x 400mm base (with a 25mm sheet at each end. Probably it would be easier to machine a part with boreholes on a CNC mill for this, but I dint have access to a large enough mill.
The wires are protected with heat shrink tubes around the are where they pass the base cover.
To control all the leds some wires have to be attached.
This is how it looks like in action
I still haven written any good program for the cube. Really should do it, since 99% of the work is done, and only a few hours of coding are missing.
