The 4Cube is our first and most popular product, and offer both in kit and finished forms. All of our 4Cubes run the same code.
Hardware Features:
- 64 three-color RGB LEDs (for a total of 192 individually addressable LEDs), with 16 levels per color channel. Thus the 4Cube 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 own cube to do what you want (difficult though!)
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.
In addition to the above, the Kit version (and the Finished version based on the kit) has the following features:
- Multiple buttons for user selectable control.
- USB port to connect to your computer for user drawing and option selection.
- 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.
To see the story of how we created the 4Cube, see Chris’ blog at www.lomont.org.
