DIY LED Cube

My old boss and I like to meet up after he retired to keep working on some hobby projects. One of these projects was to build our own 8x8x8 RGB LED cubes.

We started by learning how they work and making a 4x4x4 cube

Using this knowledge we started to design what the PCB should look like

Next we modeled and 3D printed some jigs to hold the LEDs in place so we would have a uniform tower

Then we made got to building the towers.

A lot of towers.... we needed to make 64 towers for each one. Each tower had 8 LEDs each with 4 connections so all in all each tower had us soldering over 2,000 connections.

Finally we were able to start assembling them on the board

Here is the mostly finished project.

We are still building an entire second one so we both can have one. And we plan to make a nice wooden base to hold it in as a coffee table piece.