Borg 3d

Facts

8x8x8 LEDs
every LED can be controlled individualli
Ein Laborboard mit Microcontroller als Steuerrechner
Gebaut von Martin Ongsiek

Photos und videos

Hardware

The borg is controlled through an Atmel ATMega32. There is a RS232-port, CAN Bus and two joystick ports. (the old digital for the C64)

The 512 LEDs are controlled with time-multiplexing (matrix wiring). This is realized through 8 planes of 64 LEDs that can be controlled in one timeintervall. The planes are switched nearly 1000 time in a secoud. So that it seems that all 512 are controlled individually with 4 brightness levels.

At the moment there is no official schematic, pcb or kit available, but you can watch at the schematics for our prototypes. Look in our subversion repository at: Prototype schematics an layout

Please contact us if you want to build borg, we will give you a few tips. Because the first prototype was not perfect and we now know several optimizations. You also need something like our Labor board.

The page Build a borg 3d describe how the borg is build.

Software

Currently all animations on the borg 3d are live rendered. There a no videos and a pc is not needed. You only have to plug in the power connector and the borg is running. A support for videos and especially for music visualization is planed but not implemented. It is also planed to build movies with an graphical tool.

The complete software is written in c for the avr-gcc and can be found in our Subversion at microcontroller/borg/borg-3d directory.

Simulator

To develop new animation on a pc, we build also an simulator, that is programmed with the good old opengl-framework GLUT. It is divided into threads.

Thread 1 displays the frame-buffer, that is like the original, in the opengl.
Thread 2 is like the original with the difference , that the wait routine is replaces and other files are included.

This works so good, that we normally cut and paste the simulator animation in the source of the original and it runs.

The Simulator can be found in our Subversion at microcontroller/borg/borg-3d-apiSimulator directory.

History

Martin has found this page james clar long before has been to the labor or meet peter. He was inspirational and wanted to build such a cube on his own. He also wanted to have an real 3d display and to make something useful with modern micro controllers. So he came to the first microcontroller workshop and soldered his own Laborboard.

At first he build a 3x3x3 prototype to get a plan how to do the wiring the LEDs and the cube.

After the 3x3x3 borg worked fine he started building the first 8x8x8 Borg. But the amount of work for the soldering and the driver board and so on was much higher than expected.

Exhibitions

Linux Tage Essen 2005 (3. - 4.12.2005) - http://essen.linux-tage.linec.de/
22. Chaos Communication Congress (26. - 30.12.2005) - http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/?language=de
pong.mythos (10.02.2006 - 01.05.2006) - http://www.pong-mythos.net/
Games Convention / pong.mythos (24.08.2006 - 27.08.2006)
23. Chaos Communication Congress (26. - 30.12.2006) - http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/
Kornhausforum in Bern / pong.mythos (17.08.2007 – 16.09.2007) - http://www.pong-mythos.net/

Borg3d/en