Monochromatic LED Cube

I made a 5x5x5 green LED cube, but with this code you can make a cube of any size, and it will work (demo here!). The only limitations are:

Circuit

Needs to be made following the instructions on Step 2.

Size

Don’t make a cube bigger than your house!

If the code does not work in a big cube, probably is because you exceed the data limit in some variables. The solution is changing the data type of this variables to a bigger one.

Step 1: Installation

1. Open the 'LED_Cube.ino' file

2. Change the value of CUBE_SIZE to the size of your cube

3. If you are using a microcontroller different from the Atmel ATmega328p, you will probably need to change the timer configuration

4. The animations in the 'Animations.ino' file work prefectly in a 5x5x5 LED cube, but for other dimensions some animations won’t work properly, so you’ll need to change some lines following the instructions in that file.

Step 2: Assemble the circuit

You need to use as many daisy chained 8-bit shift registers (I use 74HC595n) as you need to control the cube. That means 1 bit for every column + 1 bit for every layer. Counting from the IC connected directly to the data pin (or MOSI), the most significant bit (Q0 output) of the first IC has to be connected to the first column, and right after the last column on one of the lasts ICs connect the transistor of the first layer, so the usless outputs (if there are) are at the end of the last IC. See the 'LED Cube circuit board schematic.pdf' file for more details about the circuit, and use it as example to build cubes of the size you want.

Step 3: Load the code

Upload the Led_Cube.ino file contained in the LED_Cube folder on to your board.

Folder structure

 Monochromatic-LED-Cube                       => Project folder
  ├── ReadMe.adoc                               => this file
  ├── LICENSE                                   => license file
  ├── LED Cube circuit board schematic.pdf      => schematics file
  └── LED_Cube                                  => Arduino sketch folder
      ├── Led_Cube.ino                              => main Arduino file
      └── Animations.ino                            => animation functions file

License

This project is released under GNU General Public License v3.0.

Hardware

ID	Part name	Quantity
R1-Rn	220 Resistor	Number of columns + number of layers
J4	LED	Size of the cube ^ 3
A1	Arduino board	1
U1-Un	74HC595n	(Number of columns + number of layers)/8 rounded up
U5	Reg 7805	1
Q1-Qn	NPN Transistor	One for each layer
J2	Barrel jack	1
SW1	On-Off switch	1

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