Tag Archives: led

New Kickstarter – VoxCube – 8x8x8 RGB LED Cube for the Raspberry Pi

We have been busy over the last 6 months creating something special!
We have always liked the idea of LED cubes, however there was no easy way to drive these LED cubes with a Raspberry Pi.... until now.

 


VoxCube is an 8x8x8 RGB LED Cube which has been specifically designed for the Raspberry Pi, however it is also compatible with other microcontrollers. E.g. Arduino

Cubes can also be chained together, the image below is four VoxCubes being controller via a Raspberry Pi.

Four VoxCube Raspberry Pi LED

 

Head over to the Kickstarter page for more details.

Kickstarter LED cube

 

 

Software PWM on a Raspberry Pi

If you want to control the brightness of a LED, the speed of a DC motor or the direction of a servo, you will need PWM.

The video shows PWM being used to control the brightness of some LEDs.

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is used to control the amount of power supplied to electrical devices, especially to DC motors, servos and LEDs.

PWM is able to achieve this by quickly turning off and on the power to the device. The measurement for this is duty cycle.

Duty cycles describes the proportion of 'on'; a low duty cycle corresponds to low power, because the power is off for most of the time.  A high duty cycle corresponds to high power, because the power is on most of the time.

Duty cycle is expressed in percent, 50% is when the power is on half the time and 100% being fully on.

pwm

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