arduino project of week 11 november

For this project, our team decided to make a LED cube. A LED cube is basically a LED screen with a third dimension making it 3D. When making a LED cube, one must be able to see through it and hence, more spacing is needed between the pixels. The LED cube will have 100 LEDs. If the LED is flashed really quickly, the image will stay on the retina for a little while after the LED turns off.

By flashing each layer of the cube one after another really fast, it gives the illusion of a 3d image, when in fact, one is looking at a series of 2D images stacked on top of one another. This is also called multiplexing.

With this setup, we only need 64 (for the anodes) + 8 (for each layer) IO ports to control the LED cube.


An LED has two legs: One positive (the anode) and one negative (cathode). In order to light up an LED, the current must be run from the positive to the negative leg.
The LED cube will be made up of columns and layers. The cathode legs of every LED in a layer are soldered together while all the anode legs in one column are soldered together.

To drive a LED cube, two sets of IO ports are required: one to source all the LED anode columns and one to sink all the cathode layers.
Currently, we have ordered the components but they haven’t came in yet. The ARDUINO codes will be tried out later this weekend by the team. The team is scheduled to meet this weekend to work on the components and the arduino codes.