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[on:]

hey everyone, ive been intrested in arduino for a long time. Recently i discovered the hundrends of videos of custom built led cubes and it has inspired me to try and build my own. My project will be a little different then most of the other cubes though,it will be a 6x6 blue led cube and i want to incoporate an alarm clock, lcd screen, on/of button, alarm setting buttons, potentiomter, and possibly a sd card with different animatons loaded on it.
I am very new at programming and arduino, but i can solder and i love to learn. I do know that for the cube, ill need 42 IO ports.
      most of the instructbles are kinda confusing when or dont even include an arduino, if anyone can help walk me through this, that would be awesome.

[Reply #1 on:]

You have probably seen this Industructable

http://www.instructables.com/id/Led-Cube-8x8x8/

But it talks about the Arduino not being fast enough to run the animations due to the slow CPU speed of the maths involved.

Also this page (same article) talks about multiplexors for the IO

http://www.instructables.com/id/Led-Cube-8x8x8/step8/IO-port-expansion-more-multiplexing/

Chris

[Reply #2 on:]

Hi, and welcome

for the cube, you should multiplex your leds and use shift registers and transistors. that way you don't need to get all the pins from the arduino.
a good instructable about shift registers can be found here

for the alarm clock, you'll need an RTC (real time clock)

'lcd screen' is extremely vague. do you want a 16x2 lcd screen, or a 20x2, or a 16x4, or a full color lcd, or a nokia rip-of-lcd or.. the possibilities are endless.

an  on/off button can be a switch between the power source and the arduino, that is the most simple way to turn it off.

the other products are standard and info can be found on a million pages in the internet

[Reply #3 on:]

so ill need about 5 8bit shift registers and a real time clock break out so far.
     now does it matter which arduino board i need? i think the uno V3 would be a good choice, but correct me if im wrong, also i think this lcd screen will work fine for me http://www.makershed.com/RGB_Backlight_Positive_LCD_16x2_Extras_p/mkad30.htm
   Im going to use the screen to pick the animations, alarm settings, volume settings.
   
speaking of volume, how will i be able to add sound to the board?

[Reply #4 on:]

how did you reach the calculation of 5 shift registers?

the uno will do, but sound is not the strongest point of the arduino's (of none of them). it depends on what you mean by sound, you won't be able to play e.g. mp3's on it

that lcd will do perfectly, and it even has rgb leds :o that'll be a beauty xp

what do you mean by animations? from the led cube?
oh, and that led cube, you said 6x6, but do you mean 6x6x6 or just 6x6 ? because it's a huge difference in pins