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PiCube can be used by beginners and professionals to strengthen their logic by typing complex code to draw out various patterns.

I’ve been fascinated with LED cubes for a while now, but haven’t been able to bring myself to build an Arduino-based cube. They turn on quickly and nicely, yes, but writing the code is a horrible mess of bits and bytes. The Raspberry Pi’s Python-based GPIO interface was much more appealing (and readable) to me, so I decided to build an LED cube that was based off a Raspberry Pi. An 8x8x8 cube was way too big for an entry-level LED cube project, so I went with a 4x4x4 LED Cube for Raspberry Pi instead.

If you’ve got a Raspberry Pi and 60-ish LEDs lying around, then maybe this is the project for you. It’s smaller and easier than an 8x8x8 cube, but is still large enough to display some cool animations. The Raspberry Pi also allows parallel threading, which makes writing animations much more direct (more on this later).

I was inspired to build this by chr’s 4x4x4 LED cube. It uses an Atmel ATMega as its controller, so it’s harder to code but faster to boot.

This project uses a Cartesian coordinate system, both in this tutorial and in code, to refer to LEDs on the LED cube. If you don’t know what that is or how to use it, I’d suggest reading about it before attempting this project.”

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