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Miniature 3456 LED Cube
- stavros 5y agoI love the aesthetics of this, I must have one. I didn't notice a link to the schematics in the post, is there one? EDIT: Oh, apparently this author used the original panels and didn't make his own. Good enough for me!
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- Baeocystin 5y agoThat is really pretty and I'm happy you shared it with us. I wonder how much compute would be required to have it map an image or short video clip to always be level, regardless of cube orientation or angle of the faces?
- justinlloyd 5y agoTo determine orientation, not much compute at all, through a BNO in there for doing the 6DOF and a small SoC. To rotate the video clip or image, again, not much compute because there are not that many pixels to map.
- duskwuff 5y agoRunning a simple fluid simulation with the LEDs could be a really neat effect.
- cyounkins 5y agoHugged to death. https://archive.md/qKJ7I https://archive.md/qKJ7I
- mastax 5y agoRelated note: I spent a while trying hand soldering, hot plates, and hot air rework to solder SMT boards. I should've just gotten a cheap toaster oven like in the article. I guess I was scared off by all the people insulating them and installing PID controllers. Totally unnecessary for me. I just stick in a thermocouple and vaguely follow a reflow profile. I'm easily getting 100% successful boards down to 0402 and 0.4mm QFN.
- wiml 5y agoWhen I was getting into the hobby I reflowed a number of boards by balancing them on a piece of tin flashing, holding it over a candle or alcohol burner, and trying to seat-of-my-pants my way through the temperature profiles from the back of the datasheet. Yield wasn't great, but I got there, and it was definitely cheap!
- robbedpeter 5y agoWhen you need to reflow a board while you're living in a box next to the van down by the river... nice!
- jacquesm 5y agoDoesn't a candle lead to soot deposit?
- lmm 5y agoYes, but on the tin rather than the board.
- fest 5y agoSame experience here: this board[0] was hand-placed and soldered in a toaster oven by essentially opening the oven door when peak reflow temperature of the paste I was using was reached. Additional aside- I very much prefer Loctite GC paste: it has a non-refrigirated shelf life of 6 or 12 months (however, it seems fine to me even a year past expiration date) 0: https://linx.wot.lv/bvcoyurf.jpg https://linx.wot.lv/bvcoyurf.jpg
- RF_Savage 5y ago+1 for Loctite GC paste, used it professionally for prototyping and it has always worked well with crude toaster reflow. Still stuck on hot air and Mechanic paste at home.
- stavros 5y agoWouldn't it have been easier to just get them assembled? It costs less than $10 with JLCPCB and you avoid tons of hassle. I'm thinking of getting the assembled boards for this cube, if I can, as it looks amazing.
- acosmism 5y agoare you selling these??
- fnord77 5y agowish there was a video of the final result! (and of the LEDs reflowing into place)
- bowmessage 5y ago+1. Found some neat videos on the related project's site: https://gregdavill.com/blog/2020/6/13/miniature-3456x-led-cube https://gregdavill.com/blog/2020/6/13/miniature-3456x-led-cu...
- sitic 5y agoThe video of Malt Whiskey's 16x16x16 LED cube is quite impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciaFar8nfHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciaFar8nfHc
- fractallyte 5y agoThere was a huge version of this hanging on the ceiling of Zürich's main train station, a while back. The light display was a 3D plasma effect. Really cool! The latest one is this: https://www.mk-illumination.com/reference/zurich-hb/ https://www.mk-illumination.com/reference/zurich-hb/
- quickthrower2 5y agoYou could make a funky dice with this. For example the dice could do any number of 'sides'. When it lands, it detects the landing and then displays a random number from 1-N.
- _Microft 5y agoIf you like that, make sure to also check out Greg Davill, the one whose LED cube inspired him to build one for himself. Greg built a twenty-sided LED dice from equilateral triangles for example [0]. Very recommended! He's on Twitter and has a blog: https://mobile.twitter.com/GregDavill https://mobile.twitter.com/GregDavill https://gregdavill.com/ https://gregdavill.com/ He also enjoys photographing PCBs and the "media" tab on his Twitter feed has lots of great electronics pics for that reason. [0] https://gregdavill.com/blog/d20 https://gregdavill.com/blog/d20
- tb131 5y agoReminds me of BigClive's super computers [0]: flashing or color changing LEDs, some resistors and that's it. Quite a nice effect! [0]: https://youtu.be/7f8jgvvJe-Q https://youtu.be/7f8jgvvJe-Q
- k8sToGo 5y agoHow does one get those boards? Are there services that one can use to get them "printed"? What software does one use to create a plan?
- unwind 5y agoThis was very clearly mentioned in the article, the project was even sponsored by the board fab used (PCBWay). There are others, and prices for entry-level hobbyist-size boards are low. Two freely available software options to Goog are KiCAD and EasyEDA.
- unsung 5y agoYou can sketch out your board in KiCad [0] and export it as a gerber that you can send to a printing service. CERN uses it now, so it's worth learning, as it'll only improve over time. As for PCB shops, I'd start with comparing [1] [2] and [3], and seeing which has the best price for your needs. Generally, just searching reddit for "PCB prototype manufacturer" will get you a couple decent options. It really depends on how complicated your design is and how big of a run you need. [0] https://www.kicad.org/ https://www.kicad.org/ [1] https://www.pcbway.com/ https://www.pcbway.com/ [2] https://jlcpcb.com/ https://jlcpcb.com/ [3] https://oshpark.com/ https://oshpark.com/
- riskable 5y agoWarning: Learning how to design PCBs can be habit-forming (hehe)! It is ridiculously cheap to get say, 5 boards made and fully assembled at a place like JLCPCB. However, due to the chip shortage a lot of components like microcontrollers have stock that comes and goes. I recommend checking the PCB manufacturer's inventory (e.g. https://jlcpcb.com/parts/ https://jlcpcb.com/parts/) before designing anything because there's nothing more annoying than spending hours making a PCB and then finding out you can't get it assembled because some part you chose is out of stock. You'll probably also want to regularly check the inventory of the parts you're using while you're in the design process (if it takes more than a few days) because it happens quite frequently that a part with say, 3000 in stock suddenly drops to under 1000 and then to 0 over the course of a few days. I highly recommend getting into PCB design. It's super rewarding (and satisfying/zen connecting traces) and it's easier than you'd think. I say, "it's like the adult version of connect-the-dots."
- jbj 5y agoanother "screen saver" idea could be a self solving rubiks cube
- pdimitar 5y agoOkay, I'd buy that for $60 without asking questions!
- nrki 5y agoGiven the labor cost, it's more like $600! Mass-produced ones would be nice.
- Goz3rr 5y ago$60 is enough to get you just the 3456 LEDs (They're €0.0152 each at qty 2000+). Another $30 for the 36 driver chips. You're probably looking at around $150 in parts alone.
- pdimitar 5y agoSorry, didn't mean to come off as dismissive. It's an impressive piece of craftsmanship and it deserves a fair price. I simply wasn't aware of the cost.
- Goz3rr 5y agoAh, it didn't really come off as dismissive I just wanted to provide some insight as to what the raw pricing of something like this would be. Ironically enough I didn't want to come off as dismissive either
- stavros 5y agoHave you ever used JLCPCB for assembly? The price for parts here is okay (I MUST HAVE THIS CUBE) but I don't know how much it costs to assemble non-basic parts.
- tauntz 5y agoA cube like this + Wifi or BLE (+ sane API for driving the LEDs) + wireless charging + at least some kind of an orientation sensor = Kickstarter time!
- csdvrx 5y agoI could see that becoming big for RPG or board games!
- protoman3000 5y agoWith the high popularity of these and LEDs in general, I’m wondering why cubes like these are not yet a throwaway commodity on AliExpress. What’s preventing it? Or is it really much more niche than we think?
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- Aissen 5y agoMainly because they are still expensive, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471706 It would probably be cheaper to put OLED screens on each face of the cube (MIT media lab did one a few years back). But anyone doing a successful crowdfunding one would be indeed cloned as a throwaway commodity on AliExpress in a few weeks, probably before they ship theirs.
- m-i-l 5y agoSlightly off-topic, but can I say how great it is that there are still people doing things they like for fun, and sharing the experience with others on an advert-free platform without any particular expectations of profit? In my view that's what the hacker culture is about, and the sort of thing I come to HN for. Reading all the incessant headlines on HN recently about web3 and the tokensisation and monetisation and hyper-financialisation of everything, it is easy to think that the end days of hacker culture are nigh, with every interaction driven by the expectation of personal profit, and no-one doing anything any more simply because they are fun, or because they are the right thing to do, or just because they can.
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- BuildTheRobots 5y agoLeeds Hackspace built a 3 meter sized cube a few years ago for Leeds Light Night (which then made it to a few events around the country); though we stuck with 8x8x8 resolution. We had it playing some pre-made patterns as well as some interactive games (draw on the cube by drawing on a phone, play snake etc...) It was a lot of fun, but even with the 8x resolution there were thousands of solder joints to deal with. We also had it wired in a daisy chain (power and data) which was easier to do, but makes it a bit christmas-lights when it comes to finding a problem. As far as I know all the software and hardware was open sourced, and there's a pygame and an html based emulator too, for testing patterns. https://github.com/pbrook/lightcube https://github.com/pbrook/lightcube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj-1SvWIQTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj-1SvWIQTo (yup, that's disposable plastic cups acting as diffusers). https://wiki.leedshackspace.org.uk/wiki/LED_Cubes https://wiki.leedshackspace.org.uk/wiki/LED_Cubes I have to say, after seeing the 3456 cube in the main article, I feel ours pales in comparison.
- Softcadbury 5y agoCould be great to display the favicon of websites you are visiting
- eigenvalue 5y agoThis is awesome looking. It would be very cool to see various cellular automaton rules play out on it, treating each side of the cub as an extended screen. Both 2D automata like Game of Life and also 1D ones like Wolfram’s rule 30 would look awesome.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI shared this blog post on Facebook, and FB repeatedly takes it down as spam. What gives?