Arduino

AVR development boards are everywhere these days. Thanks to the Arduino we’ve seen a huge explosion in hobbyist electronics and the like. New companies have come out with “Arduino killers” or simply Arduino clones. Others have taken the Arduino’s footprint and created boards with other chips (Microchip ChipKIT’s for example) to make use of the extensive market for Arduino shields that are already available. Why reinvent the wheel right? Some companies however do something completely different. Enter Upgrade Industries and their Board-X AVR development platform. Let's take a closer look at the Board-X now.

Asher Glick and his fellow students in the Embedded Hardware Club at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute came up with a very unique approach to the typical LED cube. Rather than the standard block of LEDs hooked to multiple shift registers arranged in a grid-like pattern Asher's team devised a simple setup that uses 16 "spires" that are composed of 4 RGB LEDs stacked on top of each other. The entire build uses only 4 RGB LEDs and a single Arduino for hardware. Check out videos of it in action after the break.