8x8x8 LED Cube

Nick Momrik5 Comments

My last HackerBox, #0030: Lightforms, came with an 8x8x8 LED cube kit. I started building it in May, when I assembled the PCB and made a jig for assembling the grids.

I got busy over the summer and the thought of soldering 512 LEDs didn’t excite me. After catching up on all of my other kits, it was finally time to dive back in.

I thought I took some video of assembling the board, but I must have deleted it. So I didn’t bother with any video while assembling the grids either. The repetition would have been quite boring. I thought I’d do a gallery with captions for a change.

Assembled circuit board.
Simple circuit used to test the LEDs and compare brightness.
3D printed jigs. I ended up not using the grid one because my plywood jig fit much better.
My friend Kevin printed this awesome jig, which made bending the legs much easier.
Over 500 LEDs before and after being bent. It took over 90 minutes to test and bend them all.
One 8×8 grid all soldered in the jig.
All 8 grids completed without burning a single LED. I can’t believe I didn’t swap the leads when I bent them all.
Complete! Only had to rewire the cathode connections to the board because the instructions were actually wrong.
While assembling the 8×8 grids I settled on a pretty good system, so I recorded myself doing a couple of rows to show my method.

This is definitely my longest electronics kit in terms of hours spent and it had so much repetition. Pretty cool result. Here is someone’s demo showing what can be done with the cube.

I’ll need to upgrade the firmware so I can program the board with my own animations.

5 thoughts on “8x8x8 LED Cube”

  4. Hey Nick,

    Great post on the project. Did you have to program the chip or anything? I have mine all assembled and not having much luck. I was going to upgrade the firmware, but none of the tools I’ve tried work for connecting to the cube via USB to Serial.

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