Circuit Description The LED cube is made up from 125 LEDs arranged into 5 layers of 25 LEDs each.

The display itself is multiplexed so instead of requiring 125 connections it requires one to each of the five layers and 25 to each LED in a layer making a total of 30. The cube is refreshed by a software interrupt routine with each layer active for 2ms, so the entire cube is refreshed every 10mS (100Hz). This results in a display with no visible flicker. Only 8 I/O lines are needed to control the LED drivers for the cube which allows a tiny 14 pin PIC 16F688 microcontroller to control the whole cube. This micro has an internal 8Mhz clock and 4Kwords of program memory. Each of the LED layers is arranged in a 5 x 5 matrix and controlled by a transistor in an emitter follower configuration connected to the LED anodes. When the respective layer control output from the PIC goes high the base of the transistor is held at +5V and the emitter sits approximately 0.7 volts below this. The transistors used are BC637 NPN transistors, if an alternative is used it should be of similar specification, have an Ic rating of at least 1 amp and check the pin out. The cathodes of the LEDs are connected to IC2 & IC3. These are STP16CP05 low voltage 16-bit constant current sink drivers. The LED current is set by a single resistor connected to the RSET input of the IC (pin 23). The 680R resistor gives a LED current of ~28mA; this resistor can be altered to vary the current supplied to the LEDs ( consult the datasheet before altering the value of this resistor).

One layer of the cube

One column of the LED cube