Gikfun 3D Light Squared DIY Kit Cube LED Ray EK1568 (White, Blue,3mm)

Save your money! Kit is not too hard to figure out how to build without instructions if you understand how it works. But the kit is flawed. If you are going to attempt to build it use different leds. The ones in this kit are garbage. Took me 9 hours to build ( most say 12+ hours and I see why) plus an additional $29 for the small guage copper strand to make an awesome frame for the leds. It worked amazing but then every other time you power it up there seems to be a voltage spike that wipes out random leds. Been in the electronic repair business for 17 years and I built this thing to perfection. After working through the maze to replace the fried led every coupe power ups it finally fried a chip . No big they gave me an extra and maybe that was the sorce of the problem. Nope. Gave an extra for a reason. More leds fried then finally another chip in a different socket. No more spares so now it's just a cool looking cube. Checked every trace and solder joint under my m scope and it was prefect. I wouldn't be so upset because it is a very cheap fun project but the time it took to build only to have it self destruct on power up is very very disappointing. Leds are fairly dim when it's working and you can literally see the surge in brightness through a random led as it gets fried. Once the led is bad it shorts the cathode so you will be stuck with that row glowing . It's not functional with a single bad led. I loved it from the second it powered on .When it worked it was awesome! Long story short.. not worth 9 hours assembly to use it for 2 days.

I bought this as I thought it would look very cool and the fact you could reprogram it could bring a lot of enjoyment out of it. Unfortunately this is not what I got. I followed the directions exactly and did all the testing they suggested and yet once fully assembled didn't work. While building I triple checked all the soldering joints and ran the limited testing suggested. As I built each or the 8 layers of light I checked them with a multimeter as recommended and all the lights came on. Though this is when I noticed that this kit came with 2 different batches of blue LEDs. Some were very bright, others duller. Also so many of them turned out to be bad that although they included a lot of extras, I finished with only 4 left. When I turned it on, the red LED light on the board came on (which according to the directions means it was built correctly) but only about 10-15 of the blue LEDs ever lit up. After putting a good 30 hours between building the board, bending 512 LEDs and building the layers of lights, to have it not work was very disappointing.

If you really like soldering, or if you want plenty of practice making solder joints in mid-air, then this is the kit for you. Keep in mind that the instructions are a bit sketchy, but if you download the two PDF files on the product page, under "Product Information," you'll have a more pleasant time building this interesting conversation starter. Be patient, and keep in mind that 512 little blue LEDs have two leads each. That's a total of 1024 leads that must be soldered. I set aside a place where I could leave it between the times my schedule allowed me to work on it over the course of several days. If you build a cardboard jig with an 8x8 grid of 3mm holes, spaced about 15mm apart, you'll have an easier time soldering the eight LED grids that you'll have to assemble. In the images I posted here, I've attempted to show my tedious progress and what I learned along the way. I also posted a video of my operational test of the finished product elsewhere on this product page. By the way, my lead-bending picture differs from one of the illustrations in the PDF instructions--my technique of bending the cathode over the anode worked for me, so I think the included instructions for this step may be incorrect. Enjoy your new, and hopefully, functioning LED cube!

I purchased two of these kits because I did not want to wait for them to arrive from china.......One of the kits had more than 30 LED's that were bad and one of the included power cables was defective. The kit does not come with instructions and the link provided for the instructions does not work. If you want the instructions you can find them on the instructables website. I only purchased the kits for the PCB and chips, I am planning on using LED's that I have sourced from another site(wanted a different color).This is not a kit for beginners and you will spend a lot of time assembling this (not for the the timid tinkerer).

....the instructions are in Chinese. That alone should steer you away from this product, given that it's supposed to be a project for beginners to learn soldering, yet it's marketed in the U.S. in English. That put's a very bad taste in my mouth with this company. It would've taken very little time/effort to give us instructions in English. Not cool.