4×4x4 HypnoCube

April 27th, 2008 by Chris

New features are in bold.

The HypnoCube 4×4×4 is a LED cube with 64 tri-color LEDs arranged in a cubical lattice.

HypnoCube 4×4×4 hardware features:

  • Runs up to 64 three color channel LEDs (for a total of 192 individually addressable LEDs), with 16 color levels per color channel. Thus the RGB cube has 4096 colors!
  • Runs on PIC18F4620, which has 64K ROM, 3.8K RAM, and runs at 32MHZ (8 MIPS). We have only half filled it so far - more to come.
  • Simple usage - plug it in to the wall and it goes!
  • Has multiple buttons for user selectable control!
  • Has optional USB port to connect to your computer for user drawing and option selection!
  • Hackable - program your own cube to do what you want (difficult though!).
  • Expandable - general purpose IO pins and a UART exported.
  • Controller board is general purpose - it is useful for driving all sorts of LED projects.

HypnoCube 4×4×4 software features:

  • 51 basic effects.
  • 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.
  • User settable visualization speed, frequency, and presence.
  • Ability to playback animations from a computer, with an API and sample code to do so over USB!
  • 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 polished and very generalized for future expansion.
  • Three 8-bit channels of color computed internally, then dithered down to 4096 colors on the HypnoCube.
  • Displays over 6500 image updates a second to modulate the colors.
  • Code cross compiles to PIC and Win32 - see the windows simulator page!
  • Uses a custom fixed-point 3D engine for image generation, along with numerous hand crafted sprites and animations.
  • Contains hidden easter eggs!

To see the story of how we created the HypnoCube, see www.lomont.org.

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