You’ve probably heard about LED cubes in one form or another. If you’re like me, they’ve always seemed like an interesting project, but they’re complex and do you want to commit to all of that soldering?
The Teknoid cube employs some interesting workarounds. Those bent on bootstrapping their own RGB LED cube will be well-served by studying the assembly method employed here. Instead of a huge interlinked cube, this uses vertical columns formed from the LED leads themselves and doesn’t require soldering from one tower to the next.
The device, which measures 100mm x 100mm x 100mm (or about 4″ x 4″ x 4″) when assembled, uses the Charlieplexing technique to control all it’s 64 LEDs. Each tower of four LEDs stands on its own. The four leads (R, G, B, and ground) of each LED are bent to four sides of the LED and are soldered to the “shoulder” of the leads for the LED below it. Teknoid doesn’t specifically describe the assembly pattern but that’s a fun exercise for the reader to work out. Presumable the Charliplexing is accomplished by rotating each pixel 1/4 turn or more than the one below it.
When assembled it can make several interesting light patterns. It can also detect music, using a low pass filter to allow it to light up along with the music’s bass. You can see a demonstration of these animations in the video below. The flashes starting at around 1:15 are especially entertaining, and you can see how it reacts to a knocking sound at around 2:15.
For another semi-DIY LED cube (involving quite a few more LEDs), be sure to check out the 8 x 8 x 8 jolliCube, or Tindie’s blog writeup on it here.
