Four years after building version one of my Word Clock, it had started to die. This was not surprising as, the method I used to drive the LEDs required much higher current than the datasheet says is allowable.
I figured it was time to redesign, with a focus on manufacturability and reliability.
Continue reading World Clock V2
Once again I delve into the exciting world of LEDs, this time to make a really nifty clock.
While many of my fellow students at Victoria University chose to do more meaningful Honours projects for their Engineering Bachelor like assisting stroke patients with an assistive device and demonstrating PLC capabilities by sorting M+M’s. I chose something a little less serious. On blogs such as Hack A Day, I had seen many hobbyist implementations of the LED Cube, a small three-dimensional matrix of LEDs controlled by some digital controller (usually a microcontroller), and I decided to see how big I could scale such a project. The largest implementation I had seen at this point was an 8x8x8 cube, but most being 4x4x4 or smaller. I chose to implement a 16x16x16 cube with Tri-colour (Red-Orange-Green) LEDs. The result can be seen in the image on the left. During the time of my project, I came across a company that built and sold LED Cubes with RGB colour up to a size of 32x32x32 but being proprietary, no plans of the device were available.
No. 8 Hacks 