4096 LEDs Means The Biggest LED Cube Ever

October 21, 2012 by 60 Comments

Adaptive Computing, a cloud management and high performance computing outfit in Utah, needed something really cool to bring to their trade shows. Something that makes order out of chaos, and demonstrates their attention to detail in the midst of miles of wiring. They decided building the largest non-commercial LED cube would be a good project, and thus the 16x16x16 All Spark Cube was born.

The All Spark Cube was constructed using 10 mm RGB LEDs wired together with three-foot lengths of 16 ga pre-tinned copper wire. In this video, [Kevin] shows off the process of constructing a single row; first the LEDs are placed in a jig, the leads are bent down, and a bus wire is soldered to 16 individual anodes per row.

The hardware for the build uses 16 Arduino Megas with a custom-made shield powering a 16×16 LED grid. The custom shields provide the 24V for the LEDs, 5V for the ‘duino, The Arduino boards communicate to each other through an RS485 connection, and the entire cube is connected to a computer through an RS232 serial connection.

The software is, admittedly, still a little janky. [Spencer] and [Thomas], the Adaptive Computing volunteers that are working on the control system, are still having a few problems getting logos and animations to display. They have managed to create a control app to draw individual pixels, as seen after the break.

Not bad for nearly a mile of wire and a summer’s worth of work, huh?

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Hackaday’s Portal Gun Actually Levitates A Companion Cube

October 11, 2012 by 57 Comments

I was out to lunch with a couple friends, brainstorming ideas for fun projects when one of them says “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a working gravity gun?”. We all immediately concurred that while it would in fact be cool, it is also a silly proposition. However, only a few seconds later, I realized we could do a display piece that emulated this concept very easily. Floating magnetic globes have been around for quite some time.

I determined I would tear the guts out of a stock floating globe and mount it on a portal gun, since they’re easier to find than a gravity gun. I would also build a custom companion cube to be the correct size and weight necessary.

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Rubik’s Cube For The Blind

September 27, 2012 by 18 Comments

Check out this Rubik’s Cube for the blind. The idea didn’t start off as an accessibility hack, but instead as a way for [Brian Doom] to figure out where the face of each cube goes when manipulating the puzzle. It gave him tactile feedback and his ability to use it in dim lighting was when it dawned on him that this could be useful to others.

Now when we first thought of a puzzle for the blind the term ‘Braille’ immediately jumped to mind. But this doesn’t use it. That’s great, because not all visually impaired people can understand Braille. Instead, this uses dimension and texture to identify each of the puzzle faces. There are mushroom-shaped knobs, Phillips screws, adhesive rubber bumpers, raised text label maker labels, and a few other items that go along with each color. This doesn’t prevent those with sight from playing either. It’s something of one Rubik’s cube for all. Well, all except for the robots made to solve a stock cube.

[via Dvice]

Simulating LED Cubes In Blender

September 3, 2012 by 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl-kvfJxYwM&w=470]

The Jyväskylä, Finland hackerspace hacklab-jlk was lucky enough to work on a public arts project for their home town. They had the opportunity to design, build, and install a trio of LED cubes in Jyväskylä’s central Church Park. As such a high-profile project, the hacklab-jlk team decided to take their time and ended up implementing a lot of very cool features for their LED cubes, including simulating the light show in Blender.

The LED cube is similar to all the other LED cube builds we’ve seen before; it’s an 8x8x8 cube controlled by an ATMega328. The Elovalo project, as it is called, is a trio of LED cubes – one using red LEDs, one using green LED, and a blue LED cube each mounted on a pedestal in a Jyväskylä park.

Because the Elovalo is a permanent installation, the team needed a way to verify new firmware for the LED cubes. They came up with a LED cube simulator for Blender that allows them to write a new display function in C and render either single frames or a full animation of the lighting pattern.

A very cool build, and nearly too awesome for a public arts project. We look forward to a video of the complete installation, but until then we’ll make do with the short preview video available after the break.

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Building A DIY GPS Cube

June 6, 2012 by 30 Comments

Originally, [Karman] wanted to build a speedometer for his bike. Feature creep makes fools of us all, so after a month of work [Karman] had a  GPS-enabled cube that tells him his current latitude and longitude, current time, course, direction and speed.

[Karman]’s GPS cube uses a cheap GPS module, Arduino Mini Pro, a magnificent OLED display, and a LiPo battery salvaged from a first gen iPod nano. Surprisingly, the build is very clean – there are no wires, headers, or random epoxy globs sticking out everywhere. The entire build is just a bit larger than one cubic inch, allowing [Karman] to carry around the power of a GPS device in his pocket.

The code for [Karman]’s GPS cube uses the TinyGPS library for Arduino, that has a few great functions that track the number of satellites visible and report the current time. Now all that’s left to do is fabricate a case for this awesome little project. As always, video demo after the break.

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Grab Your Iron And Add GameCube Back To The Wii

May 24, 2012 by 44 Comments

One of the really cool things about the Nintendo Wii when it was first introduced was the ability to play GameCube games on it. This made it a no-brainer for a lot of folks to upgrade. But as the heyday of legacy systems fades into history, Nintendo decided this was no longer a selling point and stopped populating those components. The good new is, if you don’t mind a lot of PCB soldering you can add your GameCube bits to a modern Wii motherboard.

[Deadlyfoez] launched a raffle to raise enough money to buy a new version of the hardware (we guess the raffle prize is the modded console). He then proceeded to solder on four GameCube controller ports and a memory card reader. There are also a number of passive surface mount components that need to be added. But as the video after the break shows, once in place the functionality reappears on the software side.

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The Most Portable GameCube Ever

May 22, 2012 by 13 Comments

Here’s the smallest GameCube we’ve seen, straight from the fruitful workbench of [lyberty5] over on the ModRetro forums. Even though we’ve seen disc-less GameCubes before, [lyberty5] puts this project together so well it wouldn’t look out-of-place in the Nintendo product lineup.

Unlike most of the other portable GameCubes we’ve seen, [lyberty5]’s build doesn’t have a disk drive. The games are loaded off an SD card with the help of a Wiikey Fusion, a small FPGA’d device that replaces the CD drive in GameCubes and Wiis with an SD card.

The enclosure was constructed out of vacuum formed plastic with the always popular ‘dremeling and bondoing a controller for proper button placement’ method. Inside the enclosure is the hacked up GameCube, a 3.5 inch screen capable of displaying NTSC video at 640×480 resolution and enough battery power to get two or three hours of playtime from a single charge.

After the break you can check out [lyberty5] fast-paced demo video that really sets the bar for portablized console presentation.

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