My friend and I were looking at this drop and thought to ourselves, we could build an LED cube for much cheaper than this. However, pricing it out the LEDs alone would cost something along the order of $200! Not to mention custom PCBs, sensors, etc. At $256.99, this seems like a great price to me.
f-redAddressable LEDs are kind of expensive. For example the ones used by SEEED on this cube are 36¢/LED from Adafruit (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1655). This works out to $187.20 before tax to get 520 since you have to get them in increments of 10. Though you would probably be able to get them from another manufacturer for cheaper.
YueyAdressable LEDs are cheap as hell. Adafruit has an INSANE markup on everything. You can get WS2812b/SK6812/APA102/APA104 (or any other variant of addressable LED they re-brand as NeoPixel or DotStar) in reals of 100 for under $10 on ebay and Aliexpress. Or you can buy directly from the manufacturer just like Adafruit does, World-Semi - https://worldsemi.en.alibaba.com/. 2812b's are $0.10-0.04 depending on how many you buy.
wuf304Fair is fair. Thanks for the information. But assembling a cube as nice as this one from scratch would still mean a lot of custom plastic and PCB. Not worth the effort for me, I'd rather jump into software.
YueyCost and ease of construction of acrylic cube is even less of a factor than with the LEDs. There are many pre-made acrylic housings and cases available as well.
The board would be great to break out into a larger display inside of an unused fireplace or behind a bar. I wish this weren't geared toward hipster doofusses. Why not just post the schematics for older cheap doofusses like me?
Bobby_GanoushThey do. The project is entirely open source. Hardware schematics and software are available to the public on GitHub. The problem is that the pcb was built for an older processor and it hasn't worked right since they switched to particle photon