LED Cube Project

Dance Cube

This project includes a 3D 8x8x8 LED cube connected and controlled via WiFi by an Android app. In addition to animated lighting, the phone camera runs an on-device ML model for pose estimation and projects the real-time movement of the person into the cube in 3D.

Components

• UI: Android application used to control the cube.
• ESP8266: WiFi connection from the Android app to the FPGA cube driver.
• FPGA-based LED cube driver.
• LED cube hardware (custom PCB).

Features

• Turn all lights on or off.
• Loop through all 7 animations (30 seconds per animation).
• Choose a specific animation to stay on.
• Track per-user animation selections and popularity.
• Use the phone camera for real-time pose estimation and projection into the cube.

How to use

FPGA component:

1. Create a Quartus project named LED_Cube_Controller.
2. Add all files in the RTL directory to the project.
3. Open Cube_controller.qsys and generate RTL, then add Cube_controller/synthesis/Cube_controller.qip.
4. Compile and download the design to the FPGA.
5. Hook up all GPIO_0 to the GPIO extension board (ribbon recommended).

ESP8266:

1. Flash NodeMCU firmware to the ESP8266.
2. Copy the .lua script from the lua directory and add your phone hotspot credentials.

Android application:

1. Build the app in Android Studio and install it on the phone.