New Product Early Release: Cube:Bit. Magical RGB cubes of awesome. Lovingly hand-woven from pure Rainbow by Unicorns! shop.4tronix.co.uk/products/cube-… 
So I reckon that using a pile of 4x4 slices, H and I type joiners and various pillars and screws I can make an 8x8x8 Cube:Bit. What could possibly go wrong?
Looking at my blog 4tronix.co.uk/cubebit it seems max brightness white on a 4x4x4 cube will take about 4.5A. So an 8x8x8 is 8 of those, making a total of 36A. Problem, much?
The plan is to make 4 towers, each 8 slices high. To ensure the connections are made correctly, there needs to be an even number of slices. Here's a test build I did earlier with towers 2 slices high and unpopulated old-style PCBs
Right, I've made and tested about half the slices required
Had a bit of a panic half way through as I thought I'd run out of LEDs. But there was one last reel. Phew. More reels coming next week
One of the slices didn't work properly. Turned out that a via hole on the PCB wasn't actually connecting the traces on each side. A very rare bug that one. Now has a bodge wire - this will be a spare slice...
First layer complete. I think. Doesn't hold itself together too well yet
Voila! A 2 layer 8x8x2 "cube". In theory it should now "work". But will it?
Nope 🙁🤔
Volts not getting where they should...
Volts not getting where they should...
Well it needed 2 croc clips to get it going. But here it is
Added 2 more layers. Removed all croc clips and fitted to base. Starting to look good now
Right. Real work done for the day. Now to build some more slices. As you can see from the video in the previous tweet on this thread, the LEDs snakes up one tower of 4x4, then down next, up the 3rd then down again. It's going to be real fun mapping this to x,y,z #ItsOnlySoftware
One of the new slices doesn’t work. Short between power and ground. But where? Tempted to use old fashioned method and provide lots of amps to see what burns out!
Gave up and made another slice. 6 layers now. 384 pixels, 768 LEDs. But seem to have built it wrongly
Works a lot better when I turned one of the new slices the right way up 🙂. 6 layers all good. 2 to go tomorrow
‘‘Tis done. We haz a 8 x 8 x 8 cube of wondrous LEDs. Now for some software...
Some stats. 32 slices of 4x4 - equivalent to 8 cubes. 1024 neopixels, 512 capacitors, 32 diodes, 104 brass pillars, 62 screws. Excludes the base
