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Welcome! My name is Jeremy Paradie.  I am interested in electronics, programming, physics, robotics, technology, and engineering.  I am an Eagle Scout and I like to use my knowledge of the world to make cool things. 

Project

This site is dedicated to my high school senior project, which started at the beginning of second term in November 2014 and lasted to mid January 2015.  Although the term is now over, I am still upgrading and refining the project, as well as still posting progress.  I built an 8x8x8 RGB LED cube, which is a 3 dimensional grid of color changing lights.  It is fully programmable so I can change the color and brightness of any bulb at any time, enabling me to make animations on a 3D display.  Below I explain what I set out to do.

Plan

The project will involve engineering circuits and software, as well as building and soldering thousands of components.  I have a working proof of concept and the challenge is going to make it full size.  I will have to design the anode control circuit, build some sort of tool to line up the lights, and do hours of soldering and testing for bad components.  I will need to learn how to use an oscilloscope so I can debug and problem solve. Countless things can go wrong.  I will blog my process and progress.  It will certainly be a learning experience because I will have to do things I’ve never done before; I have to learn how to do it.  I am really motivated to do this project because it will look really cool and it will be something I can continuously program more animations for fun.  I currently know electronics basics and can build simple circuits.  I know how lights, resistors, and microcontrollers work.  I will learn and become more comfortable with transistors, oscilloscopes, and complex circuits.  The first step is to build the cube structure, then I will design an anode circuit. Next, I will plan and solder the circuit boards.  I also need to finish the main program as well as program the animations.  Lastly, I will connect them all together.  All along the way I will use problem solving skills to determine solutions to problems.  I will learn through experimentation, experience, and the internet.  

Design

The whole cube will be controlled by an arduino microcontroller, which will run code that creates interactive animations.  The microcontroller sends a signal which contains the information for the state of every light to shift registers,  which tell transistors which pillar of lights to give power to.  There are 64 pillars, arranged in a 8X8 grid.  Each pillar has 8 levels which the microcontroller cycles through, one at a time, so quickly that the flicker cannot be detected.  The lights are called RGB LEDs because they have three lights in each bulb: red, green, and blue.  By changing the brightness of each of the three components, any color can be created.  Since the cube runs on a digital 5 volt circuit, the lights must either be on or off, which makes it impossible to directly vary the voltage applied to the lights and thus mix colors.  I get around this issue by flickering the lights very quickly and changing the amount of time they are on in the cycle to simulate varied brightnesses.  

Note: This site was migrated from Classic Google Sites on August 31, 2021.