Rablcube

I wrote about this a while back over on my personal blog, I am just copying over what I wrote so I do not lose it. This is not very formal writing.

20th May 09: “Good news everyone.” It is as I said above which means I got a great project. My supervisor, a one James T Herd, is an awesome lecturer and great guy. He seems really enthusiastic about the project as I am. He has gotten me thinking along the lines of new ways to implement this design and better ways than those I can find on the internet. With the resources of a University he has shown I can get dedicated LED driver (controller) chips and implement any design structure or wiring I prefer. As with most final year projects it is the student who has free reign (almost) over how it is executed and does all the work. So now I am looking forward to a summer of researching electronics (geeky eh?), LEDs and controllers (chips). I even get to look in to new ways to store 3D information and then an in depth look at the psychology of this type of display along with how the brain and eyes react to it. If this isn’t exactly what I am interested in then nothing is. Can you tell I like this yet? If that wasn’t good to start then this is, he suggested before I could that we should make it expandable and if possible look in to creating a 16*16*16 controller. (Not necessarily build it yet, time permitting.) That is much bigger than I had hoped for. 4096 LEDs each with 3 LEDs inside resulting in 12,228 LEDs all capable of somewhere between 128 and 4096+ colours. I might build this even if I don’t have time in Uni.

Time to go plan out a simple version, 3*3*3 possibly.

18th May 09: “One last thing to do before I don’t have to go back in to Uni and that is my 4th year project introduction. I got given my first choice project which is pretty cool, I think most people (but not all) did. My project (if I pass 3rd year) will be a full colour (R.G.B.) 3D LED display similar to this, I think. I’ll find out soon enough, but it sounds really interesting anyway no matter what it is there will be some really hard and fun challenges not shown in that example like fully using a high speed USB connection to the computer and programming a PIC micro controller to display at least 4096+ colours if not many more. So it should be even better than that example. This type of display is called a volumetric display as you can display 3D objects on it, this is a pretty low resolution of course but its better for showing shapes than a flat screen. I will attempt to program it with various shapes, letters and random light effects if I get the time and then upload the videos. I also hope to propose an expansion to it, possibly from 4×4x4 up to 5×5x5 or even 8×8x8 depending on PIC or processor restrictions. Although lets not get ahead of ourselves here, this is about a year away yet. Looking forward to it.”