CubeController

CubeController is a collection of Python code to control and animate my Raspberry Pi 4x4x4 LED cube. You are free to use it for your own cube, though, which is what the following sections describe.

Physical Requirements

• A Raspberry Pi
  • 20 usable GPIO pins
  • Able to light up 16 LEDs at once
• An LED cube
  • 4x4x4 in size
  • 16 anode-columns wired up to the Pi
  • 4 cathode-layers wired up to Pi-controlled transistors

Software Requirements

• RPi.GPIO
• Python 3

Using CubeController

1. Before using CubeController, you must tell it which pins to use to turn on certain LEDs. Inside points_display.py, update the transistor_layers and column_grid arrays to match with your cube. If done correctly, turning on the pins contained in transistor_layers[y] and column_grid[x][z] should light up the LED at those coordinates, with the x coordinate starting at the back of the cube, the y coordinate starting at the bottom of the cube, and the z coordinate starting at the right of the cube.

2. Next, you may want to create additional animations for your cube. To do so, create a new file inside patterns/ and import the Pattern base class from pattern.py, the plotting functions from plotting.py, and the sleep() function from time, along with anything animation-specific. Then, create a new class that inherits from Pattern. The __init__() function inside of Pattern automatically takes two arguments: max_iters, which tells your animation how many loops to run for, and frame_delay, which tells your animation how long to wait between frames (this is where sleep() becomes handy). Adding any extra arguments requires you to override the __init__() function. Then, create a run() method inside your class, which will automatically be called when it's your animation's turn to run. Inside of this, create a while self.running: block, add your animation code (making use of the plotting.py functions), and add a call to self.update_iters() at the end, which will decide when your animation has run for long enough and update self.running accordingly. Once you're done, go into led_cube.py and update the sequence object with an instance of your animation class.

3. Finally, when you want to run CubeController, execute python3 led_cube.py. You may wait until the entire sequence has finished, or you may Ctrl+C early.