You might have seen many videos around you tube showing off crazy LED cubes, forming 3-D structures etc. But haven't find anything that explains how this is being done. Well searching over internet i found this great project made using a PIC 16F688 microcontroller used to control a 5x5x5 LED matrix cube.

The LED cube is made up from 125 LEDs arranged into 5 layers of 25 LEDs each. The display itself is multiplexed so instead of requiring 125 connections it requires one to each of the five layers and 25 to each LED in a layer making a total of 30. The cube is refreshed by a software interrupt routine with each layer active for 2ms, so the entire cube is refreshed every 10mS (100Hz). This results in a display with no visible flicker.

Only 8 I/O lines are needed to control the LED drivers for the cube which allows a tiny 14 pin PIC 16F688 microcontroller to control the whole cube. This micro has an internal 8Mhz clock and 4Kwords of program memory.

The complete circuit can be download in pdf format here: schematic
Firmware Download: LED Cube Matrix Driver


You can find more interesting videos and ready to burn hex file here: LED Cube Matrix Controller