There are many things to consider when choosing LEDs.1)You want the LED cube to be equally visible from all sides. Therefore we strongly recommend using diffused LEDs. A clear LED will shoot the majority of it's light out the top of the LED. A diffused LED will be more or less equally bright from all sides. Clear LEDs also create another problem. If your cube is made up of clear LEDs. The LEDs will also partially illuminate the LEDs above them, since most of the light is directed upwards. This creates some unwanted ghosting effects.We actually ordered diffused LEDs from eBay, but got 1000 clear LEDs instead. Shipping them back to China to receive a replacement would have taken too much time, so we decided to used the clear LEDs instead. It works fine, but the cube is a lot brighter when viewed from the top as opposed to the sides.The LEDs we ordered from eBay were actually described as "Defused LEDs". Maybe we should have taken the hint ;) Defusing is something you do to a bomb when you want to prevent it from blowing up, hehe.2)Larger LEDs gives you a bigger and brighter pixel, but since since the cube is 8 layers deep, you want enough room to see all the way through to the furthest level. We went with 3mm LEDs because we wanted the cube to be as "transparent" as possible. Our recommendation is to use 3mm diffused LEDs.3) You can buy very cheap lots of 1000 LEDs on eBay. But keep in mind that the quality of the product may be reflected in it's price. We think that there is less chance of LED malfunction if you buy better quality/more expensive LEDs.4)Square LEDs would probably look cool to, but then you need to make a soldering template that can accommodate square LEDs. With 3mm round LEDs, all you need is a 3mm drill bit.5)Since the cube relies on multiplexing and persistence of vision to create images, each layer is only turned on for 1/8 of the time. This is called a 1/8 duty cycle. To compensate for this, the LEDs have to be bright enough to produce the wanted brightness level at 1/8 duty cycle.6)Leg length. The cube design in this instructable uses the legs of the LEDs themselves as the skeleton for the cube. The leg length of the LEDs must be equal to or greater than the distance you want between each LED.
We wanted to make the LED cube using as few components as possible. We had seen some people using metal rods for their designs, but we didn't have any metal rods. Many of the metal rod designs also looked a little crooked.We figured that the easiest way to build a led cube would be to bend the legs of the LEDs so that the legs become the scaffolding that holds the LEDs in place.We bent the cathode leg on one of the LEDs and measured it to be 26 mm from the center of the LED. By choosing a LED spacing of 25mm, there would be a 1mm overlap for soldering. (1 inch = 25.4mm)With a small 3mm LED 25mm between each led gave us plenty of open space inside the cube. Seeing all the way through to the furthest layer wouldn't be a problem. We could have made the cube smaller, but then we would have to cut every single leg, and visibility into the cube would be compromised.Our recommendation is to use the maximum spacing that your LED can allow. Add 1mm margin for soldering.
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The cube is complete, now all that remains is a monster circuit to control the thing.Let's start with the easiest part, the "power supply".The power supply consists of a screw terminal where you connect the GND and VCC wires, some filtering capacitors, a switch and a an LED to indicate power on.Initially, we had designed an on-board power supply using an LM7805 step down voltage regulator. However, this turned out to be a big fail.We used this with a 12V wall wart. But as you may already know, most wall warts output higher voltages than the ones specified on the label. Ours outputted something like 14 volts. The LM7805 isn't a very sophisticated voltage regulator, it just uses resistance to step down the voltage. To get 5 volts output from 14 volts input means that the LM7805 has to drop 9 volts. The excess energy is dispersed as heat. Even with the heat sink that you see in the picture, it became very very hot. Way to hot to touch! In addition to that, the performance wasn't great either. It wasn't able to supply the necessary current to run the cube at full brightness.The LM7805 was later removed, and a wire was soldered between the input and output pins. Instead we used an external 5V power source, as covered in a previous step.Why so many capacitors?The LED cube is going to be switching about 500mA on and off several hundred times per second. The moment the 500mA load is switched on, the voltage is going to drop across the entire circuit. Many things contribute to this. Resistance in the wires leading to the power supply, slowness in the power supply to compensate for the increase in load, and probably some other things that we didn't know about ;)By adding capacitors, you create a buffer between the circuit and the power supply. When the 500mA load is switched on, the required current can be drawn from the capacitors during the time it takes the power supply to compensate for the increase in load.Large capacitors can supply larger currents for longer periods of time, whereas smaller capacitors can supply small but quick bursts of energy.We placed a 1000uF capacitor just after the main power switch. This works as our main power buffer. After that, there is a 100uF capacitor. It is common practice to have a large capacitor at the input pin of an LM7805 and a smaller capacitor at it's output pin. The 100uF capacitor probably isn't necessary, but we think capacitors make your circuit look cooler!The LED is connected to VCC just after the main power switch, via a resistor.
In this step you will be soldering in the main components of the multiplexer array.Our main design consideration here was to minimize soldering and wiring. We opted to place the connectors as close to the ICs as possible. On the output-side, there is only two solder joints per LED cube column. IC-resistor, resistor-connector. The outputs of the latches are arranged in order 0-7, so this works out great. If we remember correctly, the latch we are using is available in two versions, one with the inputs and outputs in sequential order, and one with the in- and outputs in seemingly random order. Do not get that one! ;) Don't worry, it has a different 74HC-xxx name, so you'll be good if you stick to our component list.In the first picture, you can see that we have placed all the IC sockets, resistors and connectors. We squeezed it as tight as possible, to leave room for unforeseen stuff in the future, like buttons or status LEDs.In the second picture, you can see the solder joints between the resistors and the IC sockets and connectors. Note that the input side of the latch IC sockets haven't been soldered yet in this picture.
Why did we use the Y axis for left/right and X for back/front? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Yes, we think so too. We designed the the LED cube to be viewed from the "front" with the cables coming out the back. However, this was quite impractical when having the LED cube on the desk, it was more practical to have the cables coming out the side, and having cube and controller side by side. All the effect functions are designed to be viewed from this orientation.
Hi CHR, Your LED Cube is amazing! I'm sure you have heard that many times . I only wish you would share a clear schematic for your circuit . I understand that you want to sell these pre-fab boards at a very high price . Most hobbyist, like myself, can not afford your unique self designed boards. The same goes for your source code // that you never offer a link to -but describe the changes you made to Kevin Darrah's published LED Cube Source Code I do understand you model your board , with improvements, to that of Kevin Darrahs', highly published schematic design. The same is true for the source code you use as well. But there is good news. Kevin Darrah is about to release a low cost PCB board of his schematic ( with improvements to his design ) . It's good to see that you give credit to KD's design for using 3 transistors for each color on each LED For his RGB Led Cube // somewhat more complex than your 1 color // just an observation . In conclusion , if you contribute to Instructables , maybe you should offer a method of building your project, as opposed to offering a purchase price .
KitchenDraw is an easy-to-use software application specially developed to design 2D kitchen plans and their subsequent representation in three dimensions. In just a few steps you will be able to create completely customized designs.
The main advantage of this application is the possibility to create full kitchen designs from scratch, even if you are an inexperienced user. All of this is due to the "Drag&Drop" technique, that will allow us to choose the elements that we want to set up in our kitchen by just dropping them on the floorplan. Furthermore, it includes automatic placing of elements like skirting boards, cornices, moldings and worktops. 2ff7e9595c
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