Great idea! To be honest though I lean more towards toughening them and selling as nightclub lights. Even the smallest of places spends megabucks on their lighting rigs, and this would be a toy that every bored sound tech would love to play with :)
If you were truly mass producing them, it'd be cheaper to get them made in China/India, and cooler if you could do it with smaller leds in a smaller cube.
Doesn’t look programmable, though? That would make it next to worthless for me, unless it’s possible to hack it easily (not that I would be able to do that).
Why use different kinds of static point clouds? If you have a one that's dense enough and a projector with enough resolution, can't you display any 3D model to as much accuracy as your resolution allows? Or are the different point clouds tailored to certain kinds of models?
Not directly, but there was some work on animating speech in virtual avatars[1] (constructed from a single image of a face) which uses the cubes to make animated 3d avatars.
What I found especially interesting is that even though the point-etching in the cubes is static (and of a generic head), faces are mostly similar enough (and the animations required for speech small enough) that looking at the animations actually looks very realistic in person.
Yes. I had seen that led cube instructable a few times, but the complete redesign of the instructables page design is where the real interest is in this page. No ads, all of the pictures and step links and the top. Simple, accessible and usable.
It's excellent because people have contributed a lot of great content to instructables, but it's unreadable with instructable's current design. ("Log in to see more than one sentence!")
I work for a company that does content protection, and even I fully support this instructabliss... Instructables has become very cluttered and unusable.
This is so cool, it makes me salivate a little. The author said it took 4-5 days for the construction and another 4 or so for the software. Anyone know how long it takes for someone without much electronics background? I have a vision of a bunch of unfinished components sitting around on my kitchen table for... months.
The level of the instructions is such that you should be able to hit the ground running, debugging the circuitry might take you a bit longer, I'd start off with a much smaller one to try to get some experience with soldering and handling components, maybe build a few $10 kits to get proficient, then build this. Shouldn't give you any problems.
Yea, I know. When I was in school I kept wondering why I couldn't just build things using math / science instead of just learning the rote info / methods.
I'm currently building a 4x4x4 cube with full fading/multiplexing, using a bunch of TLC5940 ICs. Placing it in a dark perspex obelisk; it's very dorky .. but I can't wait to complete it.
Suggestion for cool side project: attach an accelerometer and do some fluid dynamics simulation. A bit heavy on the math side; you'd need a good foundation of calculus for engineering. All the rest is here:
PS: if someone else would be serious about pursuing this, i'd love to be a part of it