Rablcube

16 LED Cube

The project has officially begun. I am currently in the research and development stages of my volumetric display.

The list of hardware I will use has been narrowed down to 2/3 choices for each major component. One of the main aims in Embedded systems design is to use the cheapest and lowest spec components you can. This saves money, time in development and space. I am sure you will all have noticed your mobile phones are fairly small and cheap?

As I have already worked on basic matrix designs and circuit designs, I am already progressing with the testing and sourcing of components. The aim of the project is to create a 6×6x6 cube matrix of LED’s and control them to show pictures, animations and displays. It will be a single colour cube to reduce complexity by a factor of 3. Research may be done in to building a more complex cube e.g. 8×8x8 full colour (RGB). This project focuses less on researching the hardware as it is fairly well understood but opens a major opportunity to develop the control software. This is where attempts at this type of display can fall short. When using microcontrollers you are limited by memory space and connectivity. For example, it would be better if you could upload designs straight from a computer via USB without re-compiling code or any other complex tasks. This will require development of a USB interface that can take in just the display information and then the cube will play it back on its own. I will also need to work out a new way to store said 3D designs as current methods take up thousands of bytes per animation (of a decent length).

Your average computer has Gigabytes of memory and you don’t have to worry about taking up a fair section of this for use. However when it comes to programming embedded microcontrollers, we work in Kilobytes at most.

Recently I have been working on LED’s, PIC microcontrollers and LED drivers so that I could narrow down the choices. Current lists follow.

PIC: PIC18F25J10 or PIC18F2550 (microcontrollers).

LED’s: 3mm Radial Diffused, Yellow/Orange or Blue. Blue looks nice but orange is brighter. Red, NO. Green, maybe?

LED DRIVER: STP16CP05 or TLC5922 (16 channel constant current sinks).

I leave you with a 16 cubed, full colour display. Jaw dropping.