8x8x8 LED Cube Kit

Having had such success with the 4x4x4 cube, I added it to my "Christmas Wish List" and sent it out to the family.

01/06/2017

The kit is just a bunch of parts. No instructions come with the kit. You must hunt them down from the internet.

The kit contains:

1 PCB circuit board 1 STC12C5A60S2 mcu (with code)

512 Blue-White LEDs 1 10K resistor array

2 1x40 female header pins 1 Self-locking Push Switch

8 20 pin IC Sockets 2 10uf Electrolytic Capacitors

8 74HC573 1 12Mhz Crystal Oscillator

1 USB power cable 2 22pf Ceramic Capacitors

1 Power Socket 8 470 ohm resistors

1 18 pin IC Socket 2 4.7K Resistors

1 ULN2803 1 Red LED

1 40 pin IC Socket 1 Length of wire

Assembly:

That's right. 512 LEDs!!! The kit took me just over 14 hours to put together spread across 4 days. including the time

spent building the "jig" to hold the LEDs while soldering them. Each row of 8 was tested and each 8x8 grid was again

tested. I encountered only one bad LED during assembly. When it was complete I powered it up and it started working

with all LED lighting up. After running it for a few hours, I noticed one row was suddenly not going out when it should.

A bit of testing revealed an LED that had become shorted. This meant un-soldering one of the grids and replacing the

failed LED then putting it all back together again.

Programming:

This kit uses the exact same microprocessor as the 4x4x4 cube so I already had a spare chip and the programming

interface cable along with all the software tools required. I was pleased to be able to locate the exact code that was

pre-programmed on the chip so I really could have used the original chip. https://github.com/tomazas/ledcube8x8x8

The 12C5A60S2 by STC is an 8051 based microcontroller with 60K of flash memory and 1280 bytes of RAM.

This one is running at 12MHz Since it is byte compatable with standard 8051 code I was again able to use the SDCC

compiler. http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ Along with the ISP software from the chip manufacturer's site

Attachment Details:

Serial_Programmer_Adapter.pdf Serial Programmer Adapter Schematic

Uart_8xCube1.zip My Modifications to the 8x8x8 LED Cube source code

stc-isp-15xx-v6.85N.zip ISP program for programming the STC12C5A60S2 microcontroller

stc12c5a60s2-english.pdf (link) STC12C5A60S2 datasheet