[Arduino] 4x4x4 LED cube

I was really caught up with work, as always but I will try to update as frequent as possible.

back in 2009, I came across the idea of making 3x3x3 LED cube as part of the teaching material for programming, electronics , and leading the concept to computer engineering.
http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.com/2009/06/diy-3x3x3-led-cube.html

Now at late 2011/ early 2012 one of my project students, Eagle. He picked up the idea and superseded my 3x3x3 with his creation of 4x4x4 LED cube with some really awesome electronics circuit skills and soldering skills... that is soldering of 48LEDs into 3 layers, each layer consist of 16LEDs, with a XYZ+ (I lost count of it) solder joints.  IMBA!! To make life easier he is making this into an arduino shield for those that are interested to pick it up easily (minus the hassle of soldering, just plug and play).

Now hook it up to the arduino microcontroller. 4pins to control the layers , 4+4 pins to control the individual LEDs at each layer, 4 analog pins to control the dimming effect. Displaying of patterns on the LED cube requires the idea of refreshing the pattern at a high speed, to give human an illusion that there is animation. In actual fact, the LED just took turn to light up, one by one. 

now, code time. This code can be quite scary, looking at the binary pattern used to display the led pattern and using progmem to store the "animations". The code was adopted from an instructable.


The end product is totally worth the hours put in to this pet project! Check it out~


Next stage, would be modifying the circuit to use LED driver chip MAX7221. Luckily I bought some during my last visit to Shen Zhen.

I brought this LED cube around, like a young boy showing off his geeky toy. Upload to my facebook account just to attract some interest.... Little did I know, one of my programming class student surfaced with his 3x3x3 LED cube that he has made.... And the voyage to kernel begins...
check this out yo!