“This works out of the box once fully assembled.
Note 1: There is no instruction provided. Here is my list of instructions to assist you in assembling this correctly:
1. Essentially, you'll have a few screws, male pillars, and female pillars.
2. Start with the cubebit base and male pillars go to Ground and 5V.
3. Place Slice A on top of Cubebit. Slice A will face upward.
4. Female pillar goes on DIN. DIN Cubebit = DIN Slice A.
5. Screw DIN Slice A pillar.
6. Place Slice B on top of Slice A - Slice B now faces upward.
7. DOUT of Slice A now plugs into DIN of Slice B.
8. Do the same till 4th slice - where you'll use the all female pillars and screw in the top slice.
To recap:
- Cubebit DIN = DIN A
- DOUT A = DIN B
- DOUT B = DIN A
- DOUT A = DIN B
- DOUT B = DIN A
- DOUT A = DIN A (all female pillars)
I advise using a pi zero instead of the microbit because you can do cooler things like setting up a web server (Flask) and map the DNS to Dataplicity, and activate the cube based on an external event (like a click or a button activation on another pi).
Note 2 : There are few screws and pillars left post-assembly. Those are redundant parts.
Note 3: On the pi, you'll need to install the rpi_ws281x driver. This is already available in the UnicornHat package from pimoroni. Just run the following:
\curl -sS https://get.pimoroni.com/unicornhat | bash
You'll end up with a bunch of Unicorn hat files. Ignore them (but do get a UnicronHat or UnicornHat HD - they are fun to play with).
Note 4: To install samples, enter the following in the terminal
- wget http://4tronix.co.uk/cb.sh
- bash cb.sh
Play with the samples - purpleRain.py is fun. I advise cannibalising parts of the sample code to your Flask script to make the cube more connected.
The Cubebit is extremely fun and versatile (when coupled with the rpi).
Rock on!”
