Featured on: Hackaday.com and embedds.com! Goal: To design and create an expansion board for the Arduino Development Platform that can control an 8x8x8 LED matrix. Project recap: Upon finding a video of an 8x8x8 LED matrix light display, I decided to create my own, but in a more user friendly form. To do this, I decided to create an Arduino Shield, which is an expansion board for the Arduino development platform. I used 9 shift registers in serial, 8 of which act as positive outputs for the LEDs, and the last shift register was connected to MOSFETs to act as grounding pins. By scanning through the layers at more than 30 times per second, it is possible to trick the eye into thinking that all of the layers are on at once. This can be seen in the video above. I used the Arduino to feed the animations to the shift registers. My first attempt at creating the board failed because I was unable to hand solder the surface mount shift registers to the board without creating bridges between the pins. When I turned on the board to test it, all of the shift registers were short circuited by a solder bridge I missed. I created a second board that uses through hole shift registers instead, and this design worked. Status updates A commercial version is in development. This will consist of up to 3 boards. One shield controls the 8 grounding pins and has some EEPROM for storage of the annimations. There will also be a shield that controls 32 supply pins, and up to 2 of these may be used to enable 64 supply pins. What I learned: Version 1.1 - the broken one Where to order circuit boardsHow to design circuit boards  How to surface mount solder How to remove surface mount microchips Version 1.3 - the working one These designs may not be used for commercial purposes without the consent of this site's owner, Connor Taylor. |
 |
Home > Voxel shield >
Voxel Shield Project Summary |