vtterp:
Thanks for the quick replies. At least I now feel like I am making some sense of all of this in my head... and yet it is clear I have a long way to goYour understanding of the principals at hand have been just fine, your learning journey is off to a fine start.
I was under the impression that because of multiplexing I wouldn't be pushing the arduino too much. LED driver chips and the like are beyond my skill set at the moment, but I will certainly add them to the list of items to research.
That is correct, a 3x3x3 led cube will be no problem being powered by your arduino board. You will need 3 transistors to drive the three 'levels' as a 'level driver' via 3 output pins, as it has to be able to supply up to 9 X 20 ma, more then a output pin can handle by itself. So you will need to use 12 digital pins, but keep in mind that the analog input pins can function as digital pins just by using pin numbers 14 to 19, so a Uno board is good to go.
Lefty
Jack - I'll be working on the schematic over the next few days and will post once it's complete. I am thinking of using gzip's build as a go-by http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Cube-and-Arduino-Lib/?ALLSTEPS.
