A bit better of a Cube video

I made the sparks fade up and down (instead of starting at full brightness and fading down), and I made them appear in different colors (instead of just white, although it doesn't read that great on the video).

Here's a video.

And here's the code it's running, if you're curious. Tinkering with this thing is a ton of fun. It's really only got the one API function, so you're just calling that in interesting ways. It's easy to code for since you can really only tell it to do one thing.

Electronics

The best toys are the ones that don't work when you get them, and you have to spend a day figuring out how they're built and fixing them. Or, in today's case, the ones that are just parts you can use to build something neat.

I needed one small part from Sparkfun last week, so I ordered it, and then about $40 worth of other random crap. Like I always do there. This time it was a 4x4 button pad. You order the board, the pieces of the faceplate, the rubber sheet that goes on top of it, and plug in multicolor LEDs and diodes (which were already in my junk box) and connect it to a microcontroller (junk box) and you can make the buttons light up different colors and respond when you press them.

Took me most of the day to get everything working. The lights are all installed, it's connected to a microcontroller, and I have code that reads the buttons and can light up any of the lights in any color.

At first I had planned to do something clever with the lights. I was going to get a chip that counts upward, and a chip that is a multiplexer, and use those two to light up one row at a time. I actually had the circuit built (and I could watch it work with the oscilloscope, it was neat) when I realized that this was entirely too much of a pain, and that there were exactly enough pins on my microcontroller to do it all in software.