LED Cube/Understanding The Electronics

This page is meant to give you a understanding of the workings in your LED cube. We will try to avoid common electronics slang, thus this is especially suitable for you if you are not familiar with electonics. If you are, however, you are probably better of simply having a look at the schematics and your cube itself - it is not complex in any aspect.

The Cube Structure

We will first explain the cube structure and then work our way to the USB connector. First of all, some basic understanding on how you work with LEDs.

LEDs are very handy and mostly nice-looking devices which is the reasen we chose to create this cube kit. Usually, if you connect a LED to a battery, there is a characteristic of the LED you have to take into consideration. For batteries with very low voltage ratings, your LED will not emit light. If you slowly increase the voltage, for example by using different batteries, or, if you are more used to electronics, use a variable voltage source, you will see that at some voltage, current will start to flow through the LED and it lights up. This depends on the color (or the technology) of the LED. Red LEDs for example start to light up at about 1.5 V. However, in contrast to a light bulb, which will not get much brighter or draw much more current at higher voltages, the LED will! Thus, if you want to connect a LED to a commonly available voltage source with a fixed voltage, it is necessary to add a resistor to the circuit which is able to limit this current. So, if you want to connect an LED to a battery, the circuit will look somewhat like this:

@todo: G1

Now, we are not interested to always light up an LED, but we want to be able to switch them off and on to display different patterns on our cube. Thus we add a switch:

@todo: G2

With this circuit we can control the LED with the switch. If the switch is closed, the LED lights up. If it is opened, the LED is off. You may have wondered that you do not see this switch on your own LED cube: The switch is included in the microcontroller (the largest device on your board) and controlled by a program that is running on it. Thus you do not have to switch your LED off and on manually, but it is cone automatically.