Believe it or not, [Anred Zynch] had no soldering skills before starting this project! What we’re looking at here is an 8x8x8 LED cube set up as a Space Invaders style game with a Playstation 1 controller.
He was inspired by several other cubes like [Chr’s], and the Borg cube by [Das-Labour]. The project makes use of an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 to drive the 512-LED array, and an Arduino Uno to take care of the sound effects during game play. It’s kind of like Space Invaders — but in 3D!
Complexity of building and wiring it aside, [Anred] has provided great instructions and the code for the entire project, so if you’re looking to recreate it or something like it, you can! It’s also entered in an Instructable’s contest right now, so if you like it, we’re sure he’d appreciate the votes.
And showing off the cube’s effects:
Not enough LEDs for you? How about this massive 16x16x16 cube? Too many LEDs? Okay, how about this tiny 3x3x3 cube?
That would make a great game of 3D centipedes !
I have always had a crazy idea to use a liquid to power the leds in the cube making the connections have a similar refractive index as the perspex case. I don’t know how feasible that would be thought. stacking routed perspex layers the groves carrying the water / charge. with holes for the column connection. the leds them self would need to be siliconed to the layers with the tabs cut short and contacting the liquid on both sides.
How would you prevent corrosion at the LED leads ?
Maybe get LEDs with gold plated legs? I’m not sure you’re able to get that anywhere though..
Gold plating you can do yourself.
Centipedes? Considering SnakeBite on the old APPLE ][ did addict and devastate 2/3 the staff at my workplace in the 80’s, closed the store for a day, and they rescinded their policy of letting employees take games home for free, a medical disclaimer should be included with this “display”! I can’t even imagine the damage a display like this and a game like that could do together.
Kudos! That looks VERY well done. Quite impressive. .
Very cool build! Maybe it’s too late for something like this, but a commercial version possibly using more “pixels” would make a really neat arcade game.
The game play kinda reminds me of Tempest. Very cool!
More like Whack-a-Mole is you ask me (which nobody ever does).
You need a really good imagination to see “Space Invaders” in there…. 8-S
Nicely done, must be a really hard level cause that guy really sounds out of breath.
No, that just sounds so is because my english sucks.
and I built the part next to the job and further training, thus remained at the end hardly any loss for the documentation but is athem was still there :)
and even a thank you to google translate
Anred
Nice build and all, but like a Smack High, after the first couple of times, it’s all downhill after that.
The thrill, wow factor, etc of even a very clean built LED Matrix is rapidly approaching the “jump the shark” stage.
I had a similar idea, but with Snake and RGBs
I seem to recognize some of my animations in there…