LED Cube

This is another project I found via the Make Magazine Podcast. It is very simple to build, especially if you do what the original project recommends and start with the MiniPOV kit. Just follow the podcast's directions and modify the kit to get up and running. I took a somewhat different route. Since the MiniPOV is based off of an Atmel AVR 2313 microcontroller, and I have several of these chips and an AVR programmer, I built the project from scratch and modified it to use the AVR's in-system-programming (ISP) capability instead of a serial port like the MiniPOV. Otherwise my hardware ended up identical to the original.

On the software end I had to make some changes to the code from the project's ZIP file. I modified makefile to look for my USBTiny ISP instead of a serial port. Then all I had to do was follow the remainder of the podcast's instructions to compile, build and program the AVR. To make different LED animations all that is required is modify the LED code matrix in the ledcube.c file to make different LED configurations light up for different amounts of time. Check out the video of one of my animations. Definitely a fun, easy project.

Links

• Make Podcast LED Cube Video
• Make Podcast LED Cube Files
• Crazy Huge LED Cubes