Cheers, a bigger one would be much easier!

If you're going to do this, go for a bigger one. It would be much less hassle to put together. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the challenge of making this work ;) some people just wrap the tape around the inside of the cube, but you don't get the nice sharp corners that you do if you cut it into sections and wire it together. Each to their own though.

@@ScottMarley Thanks for the tips, like you, I always try to make my projects look as neat as possible. I enjoy the challenge of going that extra step to find the shortest wiring paths with my LED projects, for both looks and better power distribution.

That will probably be my next video :)

Puts hand up for that Djing job :-D

Yeah, sorry @DJ-Daz. I already have an on-call DJ for showing off my creations ;) @LeonMOOK

Thank you, definitely go for this stuff, though be careful if you need to cut it, and score it along the aluminium-ised side before you snap it!

I was originally thinking of a modular design, but eventually I decided it was too complicated and went for this instead. If you manage to sort one out (maybe PCBs that can snap together?), do let me know!

@@ScottMarley Wow pcb snapping is truly an awesome idea.....i will surely try to create the Gerbers.....if I am successful I would be happy to give them to you as I can't further continue due to lack of equipment

@@anonymoususer900 There are two main options for doing this with PCBs. One is to have a bunch of different designs for the edges that only go together one way. The other is to make each side generic, then have some way to specify the routing of the signal at each junction. Either way, it's not an easy problem to solve (or at least it wasn't for me!). Good luck!

@@ScottMarley well I ll try my best.....thanks by the way!!

I think there's a long way to go until I get to 1M!

True🥺🥺🥺

Great! Do you have a video?

@@ScottMarley Sadly not, I’m thinking it would be worth talking through how I made it on video! There’s a picture on my Instagram @thomasmalachihall if you want to check it out

Welcome aboard and good luck with your project!

Don't build this for your first project, it's very difficult!

Thank you, that's very kind

Yes

Yes that would be very nice :D

Best of luck, I hope this works for you!

@@ScottMarley Have to say, I love the way those LEDs look with your code. I've just fired up the entire strip for now to see how it looked and how it worked with 12 LEDs per segment. Thanks again for the inspiration and effort to make it easy for folks like me ;)

Thank you! I can't stop looking at it.

Thank you :) You should make a video about your star!

Hi Moritz, this could absolutely be done using PCBs, and if I was to build these to sell, that's the way I would do it! I wouldn't even solder them myself, the assembly services from JLPCB and PCBWay are now cheap enough to have them do it for you. That being said, the design for something like that would take a bit of thinking about due to routing all the connections at each corner. Definitely achievable though! One thing to consider with higher density LEDs is the corespondingly higher power requirements. This would become difficult in a small cube ike this. I have a plan to make a cube to use as a coffee tabl which will be much bigger, but pandemic issues are preventing me from getting it done at the moment. All the best, Scott.

@@ScottMarley Thank you for this long answer. I was also thinking that the heat of many leds could be a problem. I'll make one with the supplies I ordered and if that works I'll think about making a better Version

That would look amazing. But there's no way on earth I would have been able to make that!

@@ScottMarley well it would be made more simple with the parallel type of Neopixels. With a pre-built corner that uses a clamp and i.e. ground on the outside and +5v on the inside. Centered in the ground could be the -parallel data connection trace. Given it’s parallel; you would need only 3 of 6 pin connections “working”. There are newer Neopixels in development that have a fixed position meaning: 3 wires; (all in parallel) and I believe these can contain between 100 and 200 pixels. The protocol is pretty similar to the WS2812B you used for this project. Main problem is that we don’t know the exact led type yet. GeekMom (twitter) has been experimenting with these in a string. (Which still works even if one pixel breaks)

@@ScottMarley also instead of 3D printing some of the elements you might consider using EasyEda 2 to design your own thin PcB’s to have a very simple soldering of your strips. Would gladly give you a short training to get you going. PCB’s are fairly cheap nowadays and you can even have difficult SMT packages pre-soldered for a very low price. (Ideal for a more than a one-off)

@@ericoudammerveld424 I've heard of these LEDs, but I don't know why it would be easier with these? And are they small enough to build something like this? I went for these ones due to the width of the strip and relatively high density. Also, are these supported by FastLED? If not, I'm out ;)

@@ericoudammerveld424 my first thought was to design some PCBs that clip together. I'm happy using KiCad and have made a bunch of PCBs with PCBWay and JLPCB over the years. I just couldn't wrap my head around how to connect everything at the corners! Either each edge would have to be unique so the signal routes correctly, or each edge is generic and I think of a way to select which way the data goes at each junction. They would still need soldering together at the corners unless you went for something exotic like flexible PCBs. Then what would the mirrors attach to? In the end, I decided that this was much easier :)

I was thinking more the Borg cube ;)

@@ScottMarley You should have used more green and ultraviolet ;-)

Incredblible, thanks so much for the write up! It might have been a pain to do, but I bet there was a lot of satisfaction in seeing job completed :) now do a bigger one!

@@ScottMarley OK...bigger one now competed :) A straight copy of yours, the only mod I did was to enlarge the base a bit so it houses the ESP32. I ended up buying the LED strips direct from iPixel. The ones they supplied have a contact pad for all 3 lines at every LED so were really easy to work with. I once again used the 30AWG wire which worked a treat. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mN1_msykr8DPdoU.html And as you say, it looks so much better in reality than on video. I just used my iPhone to take this and it somehow makes the mirrors look quite cloudy - they aren't at all. Might be flare I suppose. Anyway, once again, thank you for the inspiration. I might do a coffee table next.....

You can try but I'm really really busy, so please don't be offended if I don't get back to you!

In FastLED you write everything from scratch meaning it can do anything you want. In WLED you choose from preset patterns and colours. For most normal projects, WLED is much easier, but I wanted to write something that wasn't possible with it.

Sure, give me a few mins and I'll upload them.

OK, STLs are in the Fusion folder on GitHub

You're feeling brave if you're going to attempt this! I chose the size because I could get all 6 sides from a single piece A4 in size and that was easy for me to get.

@@ScottMarley thank you 🙏👍

@@ScottMarley Soctt can you share STL code for 3d printer? if yes you send to ccongus@yahoo.pl Thank you

@@tom-c1394 Hi Tom, STLs are all at the GitHub link under the Fusion360 folder

@@ScottMarley oh yes thank you 🙏

I tried both ways and it looks the same either way around.

Anything is fine, and it will probably work without one at all :)

@@ScottMarley awesome thanks

It’s across the supply isn’t it?

@@davemartin7374 Yes, but that doesn't matter. A capacitor that large is massive overkill for ripple voltages, and utterly useless at filtering high frequency return currents. Those return currents will look at that capacitor like a brick wall - you might as well connect a 10M resistor over the supply instead. The ESP32 board already has decoupling over VIN, and again a 1000uF cap is not going to do any good there. If the intention is to decouple the LED strip for EMI reasons, then putting the cap (let alone an aluminium electrolytic!) at the end of a pair of 75mm+ wires is also useless - that path is far too high impedance and the fields will just spread out and couple through the data line or whatever else is nearby.

@@gsuberland how about low frequency changes in load? Having the whole strip flashing on and off a couple of times a second? Would this large capacitor help even out the supply voltage from a distant power supply?

Interesting. I've always assumed that this cap was recommended to smooth power spikes being drawn as the LEDs flash on and off rather than for EMI interference. Saying that, when I've made sound reactive things using a line-in for example, without a big cap like this on the power rails you can hear noise from the LEDs flashing through the aux line. Adding a cap removes that noise, and the larger the cap, the more the noise is reduced. Anyway, having this present is recommended on the FastLED and WLED webpages so I don't see there being any harm to having it.

​@@ScottMarley There are a few things at play here, and the noise largely comes from two things: EMI and switching noise. The first thing to understand about physical circuits is where the energy is. There's no energy in the copper. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true. The energy in a circuit exists in the electric and magnetic fields between a signal and its reference plane (usually ground). If you have two wires next to each other - one signal, one ground - they form a field in the space in between. In a PCB the fields exist between the trace on top and the ground reference plane below. The current flowing through the trace returns through the ground plane directly beneath that trace. The trace is just acting as a waveguide to steer the field around. If you don't reference a signal to a ground, the fields spread out through the space (air, plastic, fiberglass, whatever) to find a low impedance path to ground. That's radiative EMI. If you take a 4-layer PCB and put a signal on the top layer, a signal on the second layer, and a ground plane on third, then the electric fields from the signal on the top layer will couple through the signal on the second layer, and cause cross-talk. Same goes for signals on wires instead of PCBs. This is why so many cables are shielded - you get a ground reference plane in all directions around the wires, so the fields don't spread out and cross-couple with other signals. While decoupling is often talked about in terms of acting as a local energy reservoir to smooth out voltage spikes, it's also a key factor in EMI and cross-talk. The reason you decouple is to provide a low impedance path for high frequency return currents. If you make those currents flow further along a PCB, the fields generated by those currents will spread out looking for the lowest impedance path to ground. Often that isn't what you intend to be ground - the fields will couple into other signals and flow back into your ICs and jump to ground that way, creating a ton of noise (because you've got high frequency return currents in your signals) and radiative EMI. Remember that in the most basic model of things, capacitors allow high frequency signals to pass but block DC. So when you put a capacitor between a signal or voltage rail and ground, you're allowing high frequency currents to flow through the capacitor straight to ground (like a short!) but not allowing low frequency currents (DC or near DC) to flow. The high frequency return currents use it as a low impedance path to get to ground. The critical part here is that the capacitor *must* have sufficiently low impedance. In practice, the bigger the capacitor you use, the more impedance it has at a given frequency, and some types are better than others. That's why you typically see 100nF ceramic decoupling caps next to ICs, not 100uF electrolytics. The capacitance itself is not there as a "reservoir" - if that were the case you could just make it as big as you like. It's there because if you look at the impedance graph for a 100nF capacitor it'll have the lowest impedance at the expected frequency of the return currents for most modern ICs (which is not a product of clock frequency, but rise and fall time). When you hear noise on an aux line in a scenario like this, it's caused by cross-coupling effects. High frequency return currents are coupling through the supply rails and the aux line to get back to ground. There are two main reasons why it might occur. The first is direct EMI from the LED strips, due to return currents having to flow long distances before finding a return path, leading to the fields spreading out and coupling with other signals in the circuit. The second reason is that the board itself (particularly the switch-mode supply) may be poorly designed, leading to EMI whose frequency and amplitude modulates based on the amount of power demand there is. When the rate of change of power demand is within the audible frequency range (likely with LED strips) then the modulation of the switching signals causes audible cross-talk. When you add your giant capacitor, you aren't really solving either issue directly. The radiative EMI from the LED strips is still there, completely unaffected, but you just haven't noticed it because you're not pushing things to the kinds of limits where signal reflections and crosstalk become problematic. The EMI from the regulator isn't gone, either, but the huge capacitor forms an RC low pass filter using the parasitic resistance of the wiring and traces on the board, which lowers the rate of change of the power demand, which lowers the rate of change of noise being coupled into the rest of the circuit. Because the resistance of these traces is very low, you need a large capacitance to bring the pole of the filter down below the kHz range. Assuming a 100mOhm trace, the 1000uF capacitor forms an LPF with a pole at around 1500Hz. This is why you slowly hear less and less of the noise. If you want a more in-depth understanding of how all of this works, I highly recommend Rick Hartley's talk "The extreme importance of PC Board stack-up" at Altium Live a few years back. It's extremely eye-opening.

You can't run this on a nano I'm afraid. I used an ESP32.

@@ScottMarley ok. I will buy the ESP32 and upload your code then. Thank you. Your pattern is amazing, it is the best I've ever seen it.

Yes. But the current will be much higher, so you will need a higher wattage power supply.

@@ScottMarley So we can do it in the same project with the same codes.

Yes, these are WS2812B, just tiny versions!

@@ScottMarley thank You, I will defenetly rebuild it🔥🇩🇪⚡

Aw sorry, it takes ages to sort all these links out as I don't know what I'm doing! I just have to go for places most of my viewers are from. If it helps, I'd rather live in Canada than the US! (Or the UK tbh)

This one doesn't with this code, but it absolutely could. To make it as easy as possible, I would recommend installing the sound reactive fork of WLED from here github.com/atuline/WLED

Can I ask you to send me a screenshot of the Snapchat thing? I don't use Snapchat, so whatever it is has been posted by someone else. I'm a bit confused as to why they are using my video!

@@ScottMarley for me it was an ad that linked to a website to buy these: www.myinfinitycube.com/product-page/pen

@@ScottMarley I gotchu 😉, where can I send you this... what’s your insta?

@@cameron7612 I don't do insta either, sorry! Email scottmarley85@gmail.com would be great though ;)

@@ScottMarley okay

All of them!

@@ScottMarley so these are two way mirrors! I didn’t get that from the video.. thx.. keep up the great work btw.. I love all your projects and it has inspired me to make some.. currently waiting for my 16x16 matrices, esp32 and ender 3 to arrive!

@@davemartin7374 yeah, sorry I didn't mention that! Sounds like you might have the beginnings of an LED obesession there, be careful ;)

There are definitely other ways to do this, but a 3D printer really opens up ways of making stuff that's just really hard otherwise. You can get a decent one now for $200, start saving up and ask for birthday donations or something!

Ask about, see if you know someone locally with one who can print for you

same thats why I am here and i think the snapchat ad might be a scam

An ad for this actual thing? Or a different one? I'm definitely not selling this, took way too long to make!

@@ScottMarley Yes bro it was this exact one 😂 I was like no way!

@@oliverware6384 You saw it too? 😂

@@TheIskateTV Cheeky bastards!

GitHub, fusion 360 folder. Link in the description.

@@ScottMarley thank you very much

Unfortunately not, it was a bit of a pain to make! Thanks though :)

@@ScottMarley understood. Thanks for the fast reply. Cheers mate!

😎😎

I don't want to make another one like this, it was quite annoying to build!

Sounds like it doesn't it!

www.myinfinitycube.com/ they are selling them here

hey! I got some screenshots of the advert in question if you'd like them, pm me for my email. Also the seller in question is www.myinfinitycube.com. bang up job btw!

also just ordered one out of curiosity, we'll see what I end up with haha

@puppergod I'm suspicious. There is no mention of them on Google, no reviews that are not on their own site, and the domain name was only registered 2 weeks ago. It might be fine, but that seems like a very low price. If you don't mind risking the momney, I'd love to know how it goes!

@@ScottMarley Oh will do for sure! Im the type to waste money on curiosity so this fits right in, i wonder what garbage they send over haha. nobody is making these for 35$ and no way these guys have automated the process for making infinity cubes in less than a month

It's a scam, you're not going to get one I'm afraid. Sorry.

@@ScottMarley thank you for letting me know

Haha, I'm afraid not! The cost would be way too high. Parts alone come to nearly £100, then it would take me a day to print, solder and build it, so your looking at around £300 in total. You can buy more professional-looking ones on Etsy for around that.

@@ScottMarley oh nice I’ll check on Etsy thank u for responding

Oh man, the cost would be way too high. It would have to cost £300 or so to make it worthwhile! There must be a less time consuming way of doing it, but I haven't thought about how that would work!

@@ScottMarley well perfect if you ever find a more efficient way you should most definitely make and sell them because I'm sure that you'd get a lot of buyers including myself.

I made it. There's literally a video here of me making it along with access to all the files that I created in building it. Not sure what you're getting at here.

The LEDs are quite expensive, but it's cheaper than buying a pre-made cube!