There are lots of LED cubes around. But most of them use fewer LEDs like 8x8x8 or they are one color LED based. But 16x16x16 RGB LED cube is worth looking at. This means 4096 – total number of RGB LEDs. Make that triple and you get 12288 LEDs to control. Using such amount of LEDs require some design thoughts, power supply and of course a control circuitry. The cube is split in to 16 16×16 LED grids where every one is controlled by separate Arduino Mega2560. Each Arduino communicates with each other using RS485 serial protocol.

Allsparkcube (this is how it’s called) hardware is done but software is still in development. There is ability to play with single pixels and different timing settings for simple animations. There is also an API allowing to connect to LED cube and few fun code pieces that allow to interact with it using game controller or video cameras. Unimaginable wire soldering job indeed.

[..Source link..]