I went by Danger House last night to look at the first full end-to-end test of the Groovik’s Cube hardware. The electronic components made a complicated sight, plugged together in a nest of wires and ziptied together onto a big pegboard; at the far end of the wiring, a scaffold cube supported one five-foot square of ripstop nylon, glowing brightly as an LED trio illuminated the interior reflecting surface. It’s fun to watch just by itself: with nine of these per face, fifteen feet on a side, suspended some eight or ten feet off the ground, it’s easy to imagine the finished cube being one of this year’s notable Black Rock City landmarks.

My part of the project is a set of twelve-channel Arduino-based dimmers. Red, green, and blue each count as one channel, so each dimmer manages four of the cube’s fifty-four facets. The central computer controls the dimmers via USB, and each channel’s output is a logic signal feeding into a power module. The power modules, in turn, govern the brightness of the LEDs. We could definitely solve this more cheaply if we delegated the PWM control to dedicated LED driver chips, but this solution is simple and does not require any custom circuit boards. We just buy a bunch of Arduinos, upload my driver software, and plug everything together. I’ll do some experimenting now that we have a working solution, but as much for my own interest as anything.