3D LED CUBE 8x8x8

            An LED cube is basically a 3 Dimensional display which can display graphical images and animations in 3D. In this article I am describing about how to build a simple 8x8x8 cube and how to program it.
       The main requirements are:

• Diffused LED 5mm (512 Nos)

• PN2222A Transistors (16 Nos)

• Arduino UNO Microcontroller

• A Push Button Switch (1 Nos)

• 74HC595 Shift Register IC (9 Nos)

• Breadboard or PCB

• 5V Power Source

CONSTRUCTING THE CUBE

       Basically an LED cube is a stack of matrices. In our case The cube is an 8 Layer stack of 8*8 LED matrices. The cube consists of x,y and z axis. The basic construction of a 3*3 Cube is shown below

          As you can seen in the above figure in each of the layer the cathodes of the LEDs are connected together and the anodes are connected like shown in the figure. Suppose we want to blink the First LED located at the top layer P1 line should be high and the N3 line is connected to the -ve end to blink the first LED. So that Individual LEDs are controlled by providing proper supply to the individual 64 anodes and 8 cathode layers in the case of our cube. 

        To control an 8*8*8 LED cube there must be 64+8 output lines are needed for controlling the cube. In The case of our micro-controller there is limited number of output lines. So The process done to control the  Cube 512 LEDs called Demultiplexing. Demultiplex is a process reconverting a signal containing multiple analog or digital signal streams back into the original separate and unrelated signals.

CIRCUIT DIAGRAM

          The driver circuit is shown in the above diagram. Here the transistor array is used to control each of the 8 layers. Here each of the two transistor pairs are used as switch. The 64 anode lines are controlled by the shift registers 74HC595. In addition to control all the anode lines a separate shift register is used. The shift registers converts the 3 line code to an 8 line code to drive the cube.

You can get the data sheet of 74HC595 from here

You can download the Arduino code from here