Step-By-Step

Step-By-Step

Here is my step by step guide how I made my 3D LED cube.

I started of by going out and buying all the materials I needed to create my cube.

Once I had everything I needed to get started. I started to construct a jig to hold my LED's in place so when I soldering the LED's didn't move around. I did this by drilling 9 holes into a bit of scrap wood which are 25mm apart from each other. This is so when I fold the LED prongs over they would only just overlap each other. So it looked like this: 

After creating the jig it was time to start creating my cube. I put the LED's inside of the jig hole's to hold them in place. I  then bent the negative prongs down so there touching each other. Once I had created the 3 layers of LED's I needed to solder them together. I did this by putting all the positive prongs up right and then soldering them together.

After creating the cube it was time to get on with the wiring. I started by soldering the cube to the piece of perf board. I then started soldering the resistors next to each of the LED's so it had one resistor for 1 LED meaning I had a total of 9 resistors for the LED's. I then added the three NPN transistors and a resistor next to each of them.

Here is an image of what I have created. I was able to get the LED cube to light up but that's about it. When I linked up the arduino I couldn't get the coding to work properly. The arduino I was using was a newer version meaning it was very hard to find tutorials I could use for the coding and the old coding didn't work a lot of the time.