Nick Momrik: Asparagus is gross
A couple of weeks ago I assembled one of the BoldPort Club kits I had piled on my desk. This one was project #8, titled LIGEMDIO. It’s an LED tester and the name comes from the first letters of Light Emitting Diode, LED.
It was a cool little build after I swapped out to an old soldering iron and it’s a project I’ll actually get some use out of. Would have been nice to have when I tested all of the LEDs for the 8x8x8 cube.
Back in January, I finished assembly on the 8x8x8 LED Cube. Around the same time I bought an acrylic case for $13 from AliExpress. The case isn’t designed for this specific cube, but this style of case is the only option available anywhere.
Needless to say, it needed some modifications. I had to drill new holes in the bottom to match up with the mounting holes of this particular board. I also opened up some holes in the back for easier access to the power switch and programming pins and in the side for the power plug.
After the mods, everything went together surprisingly well.
With all of the soldering and LEDs, the cube is very fragile, so this case should keep it safe. Over 14 months after receiving HackerBox #0030: Lightforms, the full assembly is finally complete. Now I have to update the firmware so I can program my own animations.
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.
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.
I wired a 9V in series with two AA batteries (1.5V each) to test out the truck‘s dash panel bulbs.
Turns out the bulb holder I tested first was faulty and 9V would have been enough. In fact, three of the nine bulb holders were corroded and unable to provide juice to the light bulbs. That explains why it was so hard to see the gauges at night!
To get by until new parts arrive, I was able to finesse some small pieces of wire in between the bulbs and the holders to get an electrical connection.
Quick unboxing video for the latest HackerBox.
Official box contents from the Instructable:
It’s disappointing that HackerBoxes resold us a popular kit that you can get for $15-20. I’ve seen these LED cubes many times online and while they do look awesome, I never bought one because I didn’t think I’d have the patience to put one together. I guess I’ll get the chance now.
I’ll probably try to do a time-lapse of this assembly, which is going to take a long time.
I found an old Christmas ornament which was supposed to light up by pressing a button. Before trashing the ornament, I tore out the circuit. While I was taking it apart and figuring out why it didn’t work, I turned on the camera and talked to myself. Probably boring for most people, but it might be interesting to see what I was thinking through the process. If you’re new to electronics (like me) it may even teach you a few things.
This is completely raw and unedited footage. Sorry about the noise in the background. I was using an electric heater because my boiler wasn’t heating up the house properly.
I’ve been meaning to test out several new products I bought. Figure I would take the camera along for the ride.
Items in the video:
The battery (CR2450) in my garage door sensor was getting low, so I replaced it. I’ll keep the old one in my electronics kit for LED testing, as shown in this video. Touch the longer leg (anode) of the LED to + and the shorter leg (cathode) to –. Usually + is the top of the battery where the words are. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt the LED if you connect it the wrong way.
