LEDs are awesome, they are so tiny but bright, colorful but easy to control. Many of us start to know LED since our first lessons of electronics. And my love to LEDs started at the same time. Once I showed a LED demo to my friends at work. A girl said:I love LEDs, I gonna marry to LEDs. (she said that for real :)) I believe many of you share the same love,too.
One LED by itself is cool enough, but by the nature of human kind, we are making LEDs cooler and cooler. LED strips made one spot to a line, Matrix made it a 2D surface, some genius made LED Cubes to light up 3D space(search LED Cube projects on instructable, or check out this video, my favorite. You can even buy a 3 x 3 LED Cube kit in Radioshack for 20 bucks ).
These fancy cubes blew my mind when the first time I saw them. I knew I want to build one instantly. After some online research and messed with radioshack kit for a while. I feel it is not a easy job for me to build a big(at least 6x6x6) single color LED cube, let alone the cool RGB I want. You need pretty good soldering skills to make it work and looks nice. A lot of wiring and complicated coding.
Don’t be discouraged by me though, there are good enough tutorials for you to go through. And some practice can make perfection. I just don’t have enough time and effort to build this ultimate LED challenge(for me). I just want to build something nice before my girlfriend’s birthday(not a whole lot time), as a gift.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
