Open Source LED Cube Software

It’s something of a rite of passage for hackers and electronics tinkerers to put together an LED Cube. It’s a great way to build something from a relatively minimal amount of components while building knowledge of diodes and microcontrollers, as well as a test of soldering skill. It’s also something that I’d never done myself, so I set out a few weeks ago to put one together.

I found plenty of illustrated guides online; Instructables has at least two: http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Cube-4x4x4/ and http://www.instructables.com/id/The-4x4x4-LED-cube-Arduino/ are quite good. Putting the cube itself together was a great challenge and took me a day or two. However, once that was all done I found that the software was a bit of an afterthought (and in some cases left almost entirely as an exercise to the constructor.) So this weekend I spent some time putting together a C library for Arduino (or Arduino-like) microcontrollers for controlling a 4x4x4 LED cube (although it could easily be adapted for different sizes.

You can find the code on GitHub.