We made the 8Square as a followup to the 4Cube, since we could use the same circuit design and we thought it might look cool. Somewhat unexpectedly, a fair number of people seem to like the 8Square even more than the 4Cube.
Hardware Features:
- Multiple buttons for user selectable control.
- USB port to connect to your computer for user drawing and option selection.
- 64 three-color RGB LEDs (for a total of 192 individually addressable LEDs), with 16 levels per color channel. Thus the 8Square can display 4096 colors!
- Runs on PIC18F4620, which has 64K ROM, 3.8K RAM, and runs at 32MHZ (8 MIPS). We’ve packed it to the gills and running it fully maxed.
- Simple usage – turn it on and it goes!
- Hackable – program your 8Square to do what you want (difficult though!)
- Controller board is general purpose – could be useful for driving all sorts of LED projects.
Software Features:
- 51 distinct visualizations.
- 10+ transition effects.
- Variable speed randomly smoothed along random paths.
- Dynamic palette morphing for smooth color effects.
- Arbitrary symmetry and affine transform mappings performed dynamically.
- Color, timing, symmetry, and transition randomization for creating unique visualizations on the fly.
- 512-bit random cycle seed saved between power-ups almost guarantees never repeating visualization cycle.
- Created with 20,000 lines of C code, and several hundred of assembler.
- Code is fourth complete rewrite, so is very polished.
- Three 8-bit channels of color computed internally, then dithered down to 4096 colors.
- Displays over 6500 frames per second to modulate the colors.
- Uses a custom fixed-point 3D engine for image generation, along with numerous hand crafted sprites and animations.
- User settable visualization speed, frequency, and presence (via connection to computer.)
- API and sample code to fully control the LEDs from your own program over USB.
