I keep trying to explain to people what Cubert is and thought it would be easier to send them to blog post!
Cubert is an 8x8x8 red, green, blue, light up cube made up of ping pong balls. It is a metre cubed in size. It breaks down into individual columns that can be transported in the boot of my car.
This is my favourite picture of it:
I started making it in December 2017 and finished version 1 in March 2018 for MakerFaire UK. It's been around the country and even to Ireland:
Cubert on tour
I did a talk about Cubert at Raspberry Fields: /raspberry-fields-2018-talk/
and wrote about it in the Hackspace magazine: /hackspace/
Version 1 was very unstable. I hand soldered all of the LEDs onto a custom made PCB and there were a lot of loose connections. Not to mention the galvanized steel wire I used was not a solid connection and the flux I used to help solder onto the wire was rotting the PCBs. Pimoroni stepped up and supplied me with 1,000 LEDs machine soldered onto a redesigned PCB. And they gave them to me for free! Version 2 was born! This time I used copper coated iron welding rods and (fingers crossed) it's solid!
Cubert is controlled using a micro:bit but any computer than can control the neopixel library would do, e.g. the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc.
I have programmed games into the cube using micro:bit and it's radio ability. You can play snake and pacman on the cube in 3D!
Some videos:
Rainbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwElr5BRzo4
Pacman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlvcRxj9PYY