Dan’s Space on the Web

Unfortunately, I obviously did not have time to post regular updates on this.

Despite a few sleepless nights, we only barely finished it. At least 30 hours of soldering later, we got the cube up and running, had a simple color-cycling display programmed as well as a sound responsiveness feature built in, but were unable to package it on time – thanks to rather poor soldering work. Yea, while packaging we shorted something and spent 8 hours trying to figure out what it was.

Regardless, we still got a pretty good grade on it. We intend to finish it up properly, but we would not be able to do so until after summer. Oh, we also made some design optimizations (which, if we had done so earlier, could’ve saved us a lot of soldering pain), but I will document them only when we resume work on it. Until then, here ends the second project log.

A new project is coming soon…

Just a quick update.

We received our LEDs this Wednesday. About $90 (per person) worth of them.

Spent about 6 to 8 hours in the lab on Friday (yes, on Friday) just having fun straigtening wires and soldering about 64 to 70 connections. And that’s only 1/4 of the soldering done.

Accidentally bent one of the columns.

Note to self: if it doesn’t fit too well into the breadboard, don’t force it.

Did a couple of tests to see if I got the row/column scanning concept right.

The basic idea of the scanning is to address each LED by row/column, and switch between them real quick.

Here are a few pictures of the latest test, taken by my powerful webcam. In this test I made a 4×4 LED matrix (well, I’m missing 2 LEDs), and lit up an ‘X’ .

It’s finally time for the ECE362 Mini-project. My partner, Joe, and I will be working on creating our own version of the Hypnocube.

Due to time constraints (less than 4 weeks) and limited resources (we’re limited to using the 9S12C32), the Enhanced Cube* is currently planned to have the following features:

• 4×4x4 to 6×6x6 LEDs
• your standard LED cube animations
• alarm clock (alarm feature will be implemented only if we have excess time)
• sound responsive, with the following modes:
  1. “wave propagation” – sound will trigger a wave propagating from the side the sound is coming from (this may also be implemented using a motion sensor)
  2. audio visualization – will respond either to different loudness or different frequencies
• connect them together – if you connect two (or more) of them (most likely via serial connection), you can have the “wave propagation” across all of them.
• Games – 3D Pong (only if we have time… lots of time)

Many more features will be added later on, a lot of them depend on the time factor. This time I don’t have a camera handy, but I’ll try to obtain some pictures whenever I can.
Progress logs soon to come!

* not final name – decision still pending.