I have considered making big LED cubes, but there are a lot of inherent difficulties. One of the difficulties is lots of wiring, and LEDs to control, but it looks like individually addressable might be a viable option. LEDs like the APA-106 are becoming a lot more common, and the prices are coming down. These LEDs are wired differently than regular RGB LEDs, They require power, and serial in/out (data in, data out). If you take the LED, spread the leads out in a 90 degree pattern, you can connect the power wires all in a nice line, that should hold the structure of LEDs in a spire. Then its a matter of connecting the data out, to the data in, on each neighbouring LED, and the top LED will need to connect to the next sequence of LEDs. With this arrangement, you can run huge numbers of LEDs, and make a very large cube, the biggest Ive seen is 32x32x32. I have some hard steel wires that are a yard long, how many LEDs will fit in that size wire? The problem is controlling large numbers of serial LED make things slow, but new microcontrollers are getting very fast, and even very large numbers may be viable.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 17:02:28 +0000
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