Hi all, spent 5 months of free time in my shed making a RGB LED cube. (Shed = outside work station for men, all the Aussie members will know this)

Now when you put this much effort in you should earn some brag rights, so here it is.

Got 768 Red, Green,Blue LEDs and about 85 metres of tinned copper wires, some solder and a fair bit of time (more than 100 hours) to produce my cube.

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There are lots of cubes on the net, but not many that are 8x8x12. My reason for this is that I think it will become a cool pinball topper for BSD and having 50% more layers give room for moving animations. Imagine flashing white with machine flasher or making the whole room glow green during mist ball or a bouncing ball in the cube for coffin lock.
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If you have never used micro processors or work with transistors, this is a great project. By the time you are finished, your knowledge base will be 100 fold.
Some Pic of the process.

First bend 768 RGB LEDs , thats 4 legs on each.
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Next make a row
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Get them out and test

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Make a panel out or 12 rows of 8 LEDs

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Insert more wire (each panel has 24 vertical wire, one for Red, Blue and Green)
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Then solder, and test - One panel about 8 hours.

Next stand the panel up and make another one, 6 to go.

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Once all panels are complete, add some wire. This is where EM experience come in, Making the harness using plastic bag ties and string.
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Just the Box and electrical bits left.
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once done, time for the final tests, only to find that that three LEDs needed re soldering, Luckily they all were with in the first two rows, I could reach them with my iron. I did test every panel before inserting into the box lid, still had 2 dry solders, one not solderer at all!!
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And that's my Brag!
Merry Christmas

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It’s fully programmable only limited by ones imagination, right now there is 12 patterns. 11 math formulas and one where you chose each LEDs state and colour, this is for true animation. I have programmed a Christmas tree with flashing lights with this method.

I called it a cube, cos not sure i could spell rectangular prism!!.

It has 256kB of memory, depending on what you are doing and how you go about it, I expect 50+ patterns.

You better believe it, had to keep myself motivated. New if i stopped i may have never gone back to it.

By popular demand, well 2 people, here is a POOR quality vid of the cube in action.

In real life it looks way better than this youtube. I’m going to say that, hay.

Note to self, don’t use a phone camera for this sort of stuff in future.

animation would be easy enough. once you have created a routine, than you can trigger from the machine. The easier ones would be animations started by flashers or coil activation. The controller is an Ardunio Maga. I have still 35 inputs available for triggers.
When choosing something to animate, you need to keep in mind that the resolution is coarse, but something like the bouncing ball on BSD should work well.

There is a kit form available.
http://www.instructables.com/id/8X8X8-RGB-LED-Cube/step3/Put-the-parts-on-your-board/

Be very disappointed. It would be a job to dismantle to get to an LED in the middle, but doable.

Yes, but it is time consuming and the result is coarse. If you look at the last part of the Youtube, it’s a Christmas tree (3d mapping). And the code looks like this below, looking down from the top of the cube. B for Byte then each bit in that byte on or off for each LED/colour in that row ( 3 colours x 8LEDs/ row x 8 rows x 12 levels = 2304 times). The 15 is the brightness for that row of LEDs for that colour. I have 4096 possible colours.
//GREEN Level 2
B00000000, 15, //Row 0
B01000010, 15, //Row 1
B00100100, 15, //Row 2
B00011000, 15, //Row 3
B00011000, 15, //Row 4
B00100100, 15, //Row 5
B01000010, 15, //Row 6
B00000000, 15, //Row 7

OK, so over the past two years I have been mucking around with this cube.

I have changed from an Arduino Mega to Due (ARM processor).

Changed how the cube works and made a few new animations.

Uploaded a new better quality video to YouTube….

Hope someone watches it….

It took me like 20 hours to make that video. Did need to learn how to use a new editing suit.

VideoPad Video Editor 5.03

Not bad, but has a few quirky bits. Like insert a new bit of text would make the timing change. Once I got that figured out……

Haven’t been on Pinside much of late. But have added a new animation to my 8x8x12 RGB LED Cube.
I'd like to share - Chrisbee’s Rubik’s Cube.

Feel free to drop in and take a look. And your right, it looks much better in person, it doesn't video that well.

Just want to thank all the Pinsider's that took the time to watch my YouTubes on this cube.

I'm in competition with my son on how many views we can get on our Vids. up till yesterday, his PB was 30 views over 48 hours. Thank you Pinsiders, My PB now 91 views / 48 hours, nearly viral.....