Hari Wiguna Upcycles a Length of CAT5 Ethernet Cabling Into a Programmable QT Py-Powered LED Cube
Straightened in a vise, the inner wires of an off-cut of Ethernet cable form the basis for this smart and component-light sculpture.
Maker Hari Wiguna has shown off freeform circuit sculpture with a difference: It's made using upcycled CAT5 Ethernet cabling and "floats" inside an acrylic cube.
"It all started with this remnant CAT5 Ethernet cable," Wiguna writes of the project, which takes as its core material an off-cut of cable donated by an unnamed fellow maker. "As you know, inside are six solid (22AWG?) wires. After completely stripping away the insulation, I straighten them by clamping one end on the vise and pulling the other end until the wire stretches and become very straight."
Repeating the process gives Wiguna a series of copper rods, all as straight as possible. A lser-cut cardboard jig holds WS2812B RGB LEDs, jauntily positioned at a 45 degree angle to ease the wiring, while the rods are soldered in place.
"Rotating the WS2812B 45 degrees allow me to solder one solid wire to connect all the positive pins of the LEDs, another solid wire to connect all the negative pins, and the data pins from one LED is connected to the next using a short wire," Wiguna explains, "WITHOUT crossing any other wires!"
"Also note how LED chain changes direction from one 'pillar' to the next. This is to avoid having to have 'flying' wires from top of pillar to bottom of next pillar. Instead the data chain goes up, across, down, across, up, across, down."
With one layer complete, Wiguna repeated the process — eventually ending up with four, assembled into a 4x4x4 RGB LED cube. "I wanted the cube to be 'floating' in the middle of the laser cut acrylic case," the maker notes, "so I kept the extra long leads and use them to position the cube in the middle of the case."
Finally, the cube — which runs from a single data pin — is connected to an Adafruit QT Py and programmed in CircuitPython, with power provided by a 2A wall-wart power adaptor.
"I'm still too chicken to turn all the LEDs to white," Wiguna notes, "but surprisingly the cube is working fine displaying all sorts of colors simultaneously on all 64 LEDs without any extra capacitors anywhere!"
The full write-up is available on the project's Hackaday.io page.