Building an LED cube usually means a heck of a lot of delicate soldering work. Bending jigs, assembly jigs, and lots of patience are the name of the game. The problem multiplies if you want to build with RGB LEDs. [Shawn and Alex] are hoping to change all that with their L3D cube. Yes, L3D is a Kickstarter campaign, but it has enough good things about it that we’re comfortable featuring it here on Hackaday. What [Shawn and Alex] have done is substitute WS2812b surface mount LEDs for the 5mm or 3mm through hole LEDs commonly used in cubes. The downside is that the cube is no longer visible on all sides. The upside is that it becomes a snap to assemble.
The L3D cube is open source hardware. The source files are available from separate software and hardware Github repositories. Not next week, not when they hit their funding goal, but now. We seriously like this, and hope all crowdfunding campaigns go this route.
The L3D cube uses an open source Spark Core as its processor and WiFi interface. Using WS2812b’s means less I/O pins, and no LED driver chips needed. This makes it perfect for a board like Spark or Arduino. On the software side, the team has created a Processing Library which makes it easy to create animations with no coding necessary.
L3D has all the features one would expect from an LED cube – a microphone for ambient sound visualizations, and lots of built in animations. It seems [Shawn and Alex] have also created some sort of synchronization system while allows multiple cubes to work together when stacked. The team is hoping someone will come up with a 3D printed light diffuser to make these cubes truly a 360 degree experience.
The L3D cube campaign is doing well, [Shawn and Alex] are close to doubling their $38,000 goal. Click past the break to check out their Kickstarter video!
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led hacks 
