LED cubes are all over the DIY world, since the day they appeared over the internet. It has become the hottest thing to flaunt around the work desk for the geeky DIYers. I don’t doubt it’s an obvious beauty and a clever usage of biological phenomenon either, so I couldn’t help myself from writing this post about how to make it. I came across this article at Instructables, courtesy of user Agofi.
This LED cube measures 8×8x8 LEDs, for a total of 512 LEDs. The general idea behind this project is persistence of vision, due to which a human eye can retain the image of what it sees for a few seconds. All the LEDs in a column are switched on and off in a very quick time, which gives the beholder an illusion that the whole cube is lit. This reduces the current requirement for the cube to 1.23mA for a column, rather than 10.24 for whole 512 LEDs, which is hard to manage. It is important to control 8 cathodic contacts to select the layers and 64 anodic contacts to select the columns, with the help of 8-Bit Shift registers. For power requirements, it needs a voltage of 5V and current of 2A. Voila! You have a shinning LED cube. Read the whole article at Instructables. More pics after the break.
