Arduino LED Cube Project

Let’s add a new LED project to the numerous Arduino LED projects we have been working on here. Today, we are building a 4x4x4 LED cube.

All we need for this project can be found in this kit. It is an Arduino shield that we need to build ourselves, connect to the Arduino board, and program to behave the way we want.

Let’s unbox the kit

There are 64 LEDs in the pack and two integrated circuits. Soldering LEDs is a little bit tricky and some kind of tweezers is needed here.

There are 4 resistors to solder to the PCB but all of them have the same value (no need to check their value then).

When the resistors are in place we can solder the integrated circuits supports.

And the last thing before soldering the LEDs is to break the headers and small pins that will help connect the LEDs to the board. You have to break those pins into pieces and remove the plastic that surrounds it if possible.

Now, solder them to the PCB as shown in the image below.

The best way to solder those is to do it one after the other. I tried soldering all of them at once, but that turned out to be pretty impossible.

There are some standard break out headers to solder. They already have the proper lengths. All you need is soldering them into their proper position on the board.

And it’s finally time to solder the 64 LEDs, it will take a while, so grab a cup of tea or coffee and be patient. Most of the LEDs should be bent like this, but not all of them:

We have to put the LED legs into the pins that we’ve soldered, and solder others leg to the next LEDs as shown below. And that’s it for the first layer of LEDs, 3 more layers to go!

Solder LEDs on the top of the first layer, be careful to not desolder ones that you soldered previously.

Do the same for the last 2 layers.

We need to connect the LEDs with a piece of wire as shown below, to close the circuit. The piece of wire should be connected to all layers from the top down.