icubesmart

What a blast! 512 LEDs in an 8x8x8 cube with an 8051 based microcontroller you can program!

Perfect your soldering skills!

Learn C programming on an 8051 microcontroller with sdcc!

You can buy one here.

icubesmart provides Windows based programming tools.

For linux code and instructions, see my code on Github and this cool video.

This is what it looks like finished.

A detailed look at the soldering of the LED leads. There are 512 LEDs, with 1024 solder joints! No additional wire is used, just the LED leads.

The PCB comes assembled - all you have to do is solder the LEDs. Note the rectangular holes in the PCB - they are used as the soldering jig for each 8x8 layer of LEDs. This makes it MUCH easier to solder nicely. The microcontroller is the 44 pin package at the bottom center of the photo. The 4 pin connector on the right is a serial connection for programming with the included USB-TTL adapter cable. Right above the programming pins are three general purpose GPIO connected push buttons.

Here's the included USB-TTL programmer. It's a nice programmer with selectable 3.3V or 5V outputs, but you have to jumper one of the voltages back to VCC. It came jumpered for 3.3V, which does not work for the 5V TTL on the board. You have to change the jumper for 5V. But with the jumper on, there's no wqy to connect the 5V line to supply the cube. You could power the cube through its normal barrel connector, but...

But it's worse than that. You can't simply connect the GND, TX, and RX lines, and power the cube through the round power socket - there's too much parasitic drain, so you have to connect the power from the USB-TTL to the board, and switch the GND for programming. To do that, you have to make a Y to connect the 5V to VCC and to the cable to the cube, as shown above. At least then everything works with stcgal.