World’s Smallest LED Cube?

Posted by FirmWarez on 29 Nov 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

In my “Helpful Hints for Hardware n00bs” post, I included a picture with the caption “World’s Smallest LED Cube?” Here’s how I made the cube.

I used clipped LED leads for the interconnects. They are square, and fairly straight, however the length of available material limited the size of the cube. I still haven’t found what I want: long lengths of square, straight, solderable wire. If you have ideas e-mail me. So, based on the LED lead remnants I had, I went with a 3x3x3 cube.

The LEDs are cheap Chinese surface mount 1206 blue LEDs. To space the LEDs on each lead piece, I used a tantalum capacitor.

Then I built a little jig out of some perfboard and 0.1″ header to space each lead of three LEDs, soldering them together to form a square.

To solder the squares together to make a stack, I used a protoboard to hold some leads vertical, with some perfboard to help line things up. The horizontal plane is one of the LED connections, the individual vertical pins are the other. Be careful not to overheat the vertical leads so you don’t damage your protoboard.

Once the cube was complete I drilled holes in some nifty black plastic I keep around for mounting prototypes to for test sets.

I used a 40 pin PIC18F device to run the cube. Maybe I’ll take some video and post.

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