First!

Hi there!

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a movie on YouTube describing the build of an 8x8x8 RGB LED cube, made by Kevin Darrah. He did a great job in documenting his build and explaining the theory behind it, so I'm about to try and build one myself. I'm not an Electronics Engineer, I'm not even a half decent amateur, but I like electronics and I'm learning new stuff every day.

I'm a programmer, I've been programming for about 15 years now, over half of it professionally. Microcontrollers are my specialty (not my job though). I started out with the Zilog Z80, did some work with ARM7 and ARM9 (GBA and Nintendo DS), but have moved to AVR's a few years ago, primarily Atmega168/328 and Attiny13.

In this blog I hope to document every step of the build and explain what went well and what went wrong (and why). If you're new to LED cubes then I recommend you watch Kevin Darrah's movies on his website: www.kevindarrah.com
After that, come back and check out my build :)

There's a few things I want to try and do "better" than his build. Time will tell if it works, but I'll give it a shot.

• Less of a wire mess, it looks cool and techy but I simply don't have that much room to keep an object of that size without having my wife complain about it ;) All electronics need to fit underneath the cube in a flat package.
• I plan on designing some PCBs for the electronics instead of using prototype boards. I want to use SMD components to reduce the size of the boards and, with that, also the cost. Fortunately I have some family and colleagues with enough knowledge, experience and credentials to verify my designs.
• A few major changes will be made to the code. In fact, I've already rewritten most of it and initial tests show a major performance improvement. A refresh rate of 100Hz should not be a problem and there will be plenty of CPU power left for animations.
• I plan on streaming animations to the cube instead of having them generated at runtime by the microcontroller. Current calculations show that there's plenty of CPU time left to stream new frames in at 100 frames per second. I plan on streaming them from SD card or a PC using Ethernet. I've looked at using UART (serial port) for streaming but it seems impossible to provide a stable stream of data. 

Plenty of stuff on the wish list, so let's get started!