REVIEW: Pico Cube
By Marc de Vinck. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
3D LED cubes have been around for a long time. They are a relatively popular kit for DIYers. However, they are also typically difficult to build, as they usually rely on free-form soldering of many through-hole LEDs to form the cube. I have built a few 3×3×3 cubes, and although they came out well, they weren’t exactly fun to put together. I never attempted to build a 4×4×4.
The Pico Cube, from SB Components in the UK, is a 4×4×4 cube that runs via a Raspberry Pi Pico and aims to make building a 3D LED cube actually enjoyable. They took out a lot of the variability of the building process by integrating PCBs instead of relying on the LEDs’ wires for the structure. And for those of you that don’t want to deal with soldering (gasp!), they even offer a fully assembled version!
Verdict
8/10
An easier way to build a cube.
Marc de Vinck is the founder of Unexpected Labs and creator dLUX-dLites
Subscribe to Raspberry Pi Official Magazine
Save up to 37% off the cover price and get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W with a subscription to Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
More articles
MirrorBallBot
This trick uses no smoke but it does use mirrors
Read more →
Digital Displays in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine 170
Some projects seem more like magic to us than anything else; here’s one of them. This robot by Italian engineer/magician Andrea Favero uses a mirror to widen the field of vision of a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, the input from which is processed by Raspberry Pi 4 and used to control three legs to […]
Read more →
Win a Development Kit for Compute Module 5
Make CM5 development easier with our competition
Read more →