1. Getting Started - Ordering the Kit

My daughter and I wanted to have a go at building an LED light cube.  Never seen one?  Well take a look at this video to see the sort of thing I'm talking about:

I've had a little experience with electronics and so I wasn't worried about building one so we looked on eBay and I found this kit for sale:

8x8x8 BLUE LED CUBE 3D MATRIX - INCLUDES CASE - ADVANCED ARDUINO KIT 512 LEDS

This is a kit made by a company called Shengyuan Electronics and which is described on the http://www.syyyd.com forum website.  If like me you can't read Chinese then just search for it on Google and click 'Translate this Page' to see an automated English translation.  Better still, if you have Google Chrome it can be made to translate the pages automatically.

Note!  Before you rush off and buy this, please be aware that this kit involves soldering surface mount devices - if you are inexperienced with this sort of thing I would think twice about buying this particular kit.

There are several kits available, so why an 8x8x8 and not a 4x4x4 or a 16x16x16?  My reason was simply that cubes of 8 are easier to explain in terms of individual bytes.  Each column of 8 LEDs represents one byte of data, i.e. 8 bits, so I figured that it will be much easier for my children (and me!) to understand.  My intention was to run the cube from a PICAXE microcontroller programmed in BASIC.  The blurb for this particular kit said that you could either run it from its own controller or from your PC via supplied software.  A glance at the screenshot told me that it would work with a standard serial port so I felt that we should be able to have some fun with it - both building it and learning how to program our own microcontroller with our own patterns.

So, we placed the order and waited for the kit to arrive...