LED-Cube

It is Christmas time 2004. While everybody is looking for the last presents, some slobs have too much time. They matt 125 LEDs with sandpaper, solder them together and produce a real piece of art.

The project was inspired by James Clar, the Network Wizards and of course by the great installation at the Camp 2003.

The LED-Cube works with a ATMEGA32 microcontroller that controls the LEDs by using the multiplex operation which reduces the number of ports. 25 columns and fivefold multiplex operation for the five lines are enough to manage the 125 LEDs. The "red greyscales" are obtained by time-division multiplexing. The cube is approached by the serial interface RS232.

3D-Pong (in front and behind the rackets can be seen and the ball above)

cube modeller

LED cube modeller

Everybody is able to creat movies for the cube by a fitting program which can also be used to import and to edit movies generated with other programs. Thus, some existing movies are build with Ruby, Perl and Common Lisp. The cube modeller is written in Lisp by using CL-SDL to enable OpenGL to show the cube.

You can click the bullets which symolise the single LEDs to switch them on and off. Likewise, the cube is rotatable by the mouse. While the cube (hardware) is connected to the computer, the particular LED will glow.

LED-Cube-Analyzer Plug-in for XMMS

The XMMS-Plug-in is a spectrum analyzer which uses the third dimension of the cube for displaying not only the current frequency spectrum but also the four previous ones. It is based on the Plug-in Code of the Plug-in sanalyzer the XMMS-packet also includes.

Additionally, a small X-Window with a two-dimensional spectrum analyzer is displayed which can be seen as a sanalyzer with less bars (five instead of 16) and less detailed levels (six instead of 101). This enables people to see something without having the cube at their fingertips.

official website: http://www.entropia.de/wiki/LED-Cube (in German)
contact persons: Max-Gerd Retzlaff or Alex Wenger

-- STephanKambor - 01 Feb 2005
-- JulianePilster - 07 Aug 2007 (translation)