I decided that it was too hard to write animations for my LED Cube. So I wrote a Processing program to generate the code for it. All you have to do is load the program and click on the green LEDs(circles) to turn them on and when you are done with a frame of animation you click the orange button at the bottom then the code will be printed out to the console. Then you copy the code into the firmware and upload the program to the Arduino. Here is the program.

So I was watching Weekend Projects a about two and a half months ago and saw how to make a 3 by 3 by 3 LED cube. I thought, “Hey! I could do that with my Arduino!” and I did. Basically, I can turn any individual LED on or off.

I started with soldering together the LEDs in layers of nine. Then I played around with how to wire up a protoboard with two Shift Registers on it and the LEDs to make a Shield for the Arduino. The first try was messy. The second try was better but not ideal. The final wiring guide may LOOK messy, but it’s basically what I used.

The final wiring on the protoboard from the bottom is the last photo.

The software was a compilation of the original software from the Weekend Projects post and the ShiftOut example on Arduino.cc. I started with the “Code Sample 2.3 - Dual Defined Arrays” at the bottom of the ShiftOut example and slowly stirred in the original code to produce the final result. Here is the final code.

Here’s a link to the Flickr photos.

P.s. On a side note, I did the layout and wiring wrong so I had to modify the code to compensate for the LEDs being connected wrong.