A Cubists Interpretation of the Blinky LED - 4x4x4 LED cube

A few weeks ago, Loclhst suggested he wanted to make a LED cube.  After a little research, I came upon this instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-4x4x4-LED-Cube/  

Localhst and I finally managed to scrounge some time up, and we met at PumpingStation:One for a bit of a hack session.  We made some jigs, and started soldering.  

This is James using my jig to make his own LED cube:

Here's a little bit of Loclhsts handywork.  He's really picking up this soldering thing.

Here are two of my LED layers.  It was about this time that I figured out that I'd need to have some method for bending over the LED legs.

And here's all the LEDs built up into a "cube".  It's more like a big parallelogram.  But who's counting.  ... and get that protractor away from my CUBE.

The legs that stick out the side are the ground pins.  Those let us address each layer seperately.

 Nothing like building a wiring harness at 12:30 at night.  And doing it neatly.  And cleanly.  There's heatshrink tubing and everything!

This was testing the first layer.  You can actually see the arduino board in this shot.  Once it's fully hooked up, there's 20 IO pins in use.

Lets play find the Duemenilove!  It's in there.. I swear!

Localhst didn't finish his.  But he did make a 12v regulated power supply for a soldering ventilation solution.  Ideapdish also gave me the parts to build a box to put my led cube in.  I'm excited to assemble it and get this into a displayable condition!  

How fast can an arduino switch?

Using blink, set with 0 delay, my o-scope registered 62khz. 

Now I have done a little programming with PIC.  And if it takes 4 clocks to run each command, a 16mhz PIC should be able to output 2mhz.  I was told AVR can do most things in two clocks, so it should be able to pump out 8mhz!

And we're getting 62khz.  It says something about the arduino overhead, and the compiler.

Shifing a bit. Lots of bits.

Well since I am out of instrument type op amps, I went ahead and dug out my shift registers.  I got it working.. after finding out you need to power all the power lines. 

Here's the instructable I refrenced when I ordered the shift registers: http://www.instructables.com/id/The-74HC164-Shift-Register-and-your-Arduino/

I'm going to need to give this another swing soon.  

Testing sensors.

Well I bought some pressure sensors.  In hopes of building my own altimeter.  When motorola says 5-25mv output, they aren't kidding.  The mpx2010 has an output that seems perfectly tuned to feed an opamp.  Time to learn opamps.

Here's a link to the datasheet: MPX2010

Playing with digital glue: using an arduino as a really expensive voltmeter.

Last Thursday I met up with Loclhst to show him how to use analog sensors with his arduino. 

The process started with testing the photoresistor and thermistor on the bench with a voltmeter.  We then set them up in a voltage divider, and fed 5v across them.  That got us a voltage output we could send to the arduino. 

Then we hooked up the voltage dividers to the arduino, and we got real values. 

Then dan wanted to get his display working.   After we discovered I had a wire crossed, the display worked fine.