4x4 LED Cube

April 2014

LEDs have become one of my favorite mediums to work with, probably because their output provides such immediate gratification. In fact, this 4x4x4 LED cube project was quite popular amongst coworkers when I would leave it sitting out on my desk. There are so many variations of light shows you can make with this simple cube that made it quite an entertaining little addition to my electronics creations. I know it is not the most practical of things, but it was still a source of learning to my sophomore engineering self.

The bulk of the work to make one of these is going to be in the soldering. Making sure the LED leads are straight and stable takes some meticulous effort. To hold each layer in place while I did the soldering, I took a block of wood and drilled holes for the LEDs to lay exactly perfectly spaced apart. Once you get the top layer of 16 in place, you repeat, until you have soldered all 64 LEDs. This inexpectantly took me several hours, which could also be due to my perfectionism. I had to be extremely careful as I began soldering each junction to its designated logic controller pin as well.

The microcontroller I used was a PIC 18F25K22. The entire thing was powered by a four pack 4 of AA batteries. This had to be run through a voltage regulator circuit that you can see in the corner of the protoboard. Loading the code onto the board was simple using MPLAB’s Integrated Programming Environment (IPE). There are several exposed pins bent at an angle on the board where a PICkit programmer is attached and then connected to a computer via USB. Once you are done debugging and uploading code, you can remove this device, and your project is ready to be turned on at anytime.

This LED cube was significant to me in that it sparked my excitement with at-home electronics tinkering that was not a graded class-required project. It reminded me why I chose this major in the first place. I really love being able to merge my creative and technical halves of my brain to make things that are just cool. The feedback I received proved to me that others find excitement in technology for the same reasons. I hope to continue experimenting and making until the world is absolutely filled with cool stuff.