LED Cube: 3x3x3 cube soldered
Last time I hinted that I finally put together the full 3x3x3 cube.
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| From Building LED Cube |
From another perspective it is better visible that I changed the soldering process a bit from the first layer compared to the others.
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| From Building LED Cube |
The top layer has some brownish residues on the bottom of the LEDs. These are traces of the soldering flux which burnt into the LEDs bases when I kept the soldering iron a tad too long close to them. For the other layers I left out the additional flux and also tried to keep the heating phase as short as possible on the pins. The result is that the two lower layers have clean LEDs. But two of the joints broke again and had to be fixed during the first test in the breadboard so they don't seem to be as stable. Another thing I should remember for later is that I should sand the iron wires next time before soldering. They look a bit dirty in the cube, swallow some light and probably are harder to solder that way too.
Nevertheless the finished cube allowed some cleanup of the crowded breadboard by reducing the required traces to only a single "bus" and relocating the layer control. Furthermore the "bent wire" connection for the planes (visible in the photos from last time) have been replaced by croco clip wires for a higher reliability and flexibility.
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| From Building LED Cube |
And powering up the cube and testing all LEDs for correct functionality shows everything working as expected and its whole glory.
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| From Building LED Cube |
The observant reader may have noticed that the circuit of the layer logic has changed since its last appearance. This is the intermediate result of many hours of playing working with my latest technical acquisition. But more on that in a later post.
As for the grid construction of the cube in general: I doubt that I could solder the big 8x8x8 in the same manner as I did the small cube. With the small one I initially soldered the three 3x3 layers individually and then put the layers together by first attaching the corner connections and then the inner leads. As I could do this by hand it just worked but in the height of 8 layers stabilizing one (unstable) 8x8 layer for soldering and keeping the distances exact is nearly impossible. So I need some sort of metal or wooden rack during soldering but I'm not sure yet how it should be constructed and used. There are some ideas floating in my head but I have to think more about those and probably test some of it.