As cool as sculptural LED cubes are, the only thing you can really do is look at them. They’re not going to stand up to a lot of handling, and as tedious as it is to bend all those leads when building them, you probably wouldn’t want to mess with them anyway.
LED dice on the other hand are robust, blinky playthings with many possibilities, especially if they have a gyroscope and wireless control like the one [moekoe] built. Inside this tiny 25cm³ die is the equally small ESP8285-01F, which lets [moekoe] control the rainbow light show with a Blynk app.
As you will see in the excellent build video that makes this build look challenging instead of impossible, the cube gets permanently sealed up with solder joints. Most but not all of these transfer power, ground, and data around the faces.
Once the cube is together, [moekoe] uses pogo pins to program it, and can charge the little LiPo inside through contact pads. We love the idea of using a cubical printed jig to help solder the PCB edges together, but not as much as we love [moekoe]’s home-brewed SMT soldering setup.
If you want an easier way to make sculptural LED cubes, build yourself a lead-formin’ machine.
Maybe encase it in clear resin and either have two corners as metal contacts and make a little cradle to charge it or just wrap some copper wire around each pcb and have wireless charging. Smd anything tends to fall off if a PCB is chucked around too much.
Beat me too it.
Needs to be put inside a clear [plastic case maybe one made of pieces of plexiglass.
What a cool soldering iron :)
Now we can solder a whole SMD board at once with a single soldering iron!
Ok, really like this idea to put together the cube using solder joints on the edges. That is a great idea.
Makes me want to make one with upside down mounted LEDs sticking through holes in the PCB.. (Poorman’s bottom firing LEDs)
There would need to be another board inside for the micro but otherwise, great idea!
Same guy, smaller cube…
PIKOCUBE | is it the smallest LED cube on earth? | complete build | makermoekoe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_9e0_Fdaek
Here is the build page for the clothes-iron hot plate solder thingy. (WARNING this is a Wix/Parastorage web site so it may not load, especially if your browser has a scripting bloat blocker enabled.):
https://www.makermoekoe.net/post/maker-moekoe-s-kind-of-soldering-iron
Here I was thinking it was a die you could actually use to play craps-in-the-dark (with people you really trust not to grab your money.)