Driving a Processing sketch with an Arduino LED button pad

LEDs are cool. Buttons are fun to push. Animated geometric patterns are nice. I wanted to combine all three!

How it works: I'm using this Arduino Mega controlled pad of LED buttons to drive a Processing sketch. When a button is pushed, it sends a message over a serial connection, which the Processing sketch picks up. The sketch is drawing an array of spinning cubes and it changes variables related to what it's drawing, depending on which button was pushed. The kind of things it changes are the size of the cubes, the range of colours and the number of cubes. I've been amazed at the amount of variety this brings, as you'll see near the end of the video!

I'll be adding an Instructable soon as well as uploading a couple more in depth videos on the coding/electronics.

Subscribe to my channel if you want to see those videos when they arrive, or if you want to know when I have new projects!

I learnt a lot from this tutorial:

I'm online at:

Music in this video is from Epidemic Sound:
Albatross - Christian Nanzell
Youth Is Wasted On The Young (Chez Remix) (Instrumental Version) - Tellow

[JaumeMarinVicente]

Wow... exceptional Job! Full of beauty and master control... Top artist 👀

[lukassembol]

Wow! This project looks awesome! Although the first part was a little bit triggering for me... you know, the pre-cutting leads, cutting them with scissors and destroying jumper cables. I know there may be pragmatic reasons to do so, but it still rubs me the wrong way because I was strictly taught not to do these things 😅

[sofiarivas]

Woow! Just the information I needed! Thanks for sharing!

[KikiTay]

Everything that I love! Thanks for sharing! Keep it up!

[matthewvandenheuvel]

Excellent editing. And project, congrats

[onduful]

Very nice, i love it, thanks for sharing

[oicangito]

this video was great... am subscribing

[AnimilesYT]

Okay, so you have an RBG button pad, but you're only using the green colours.
I think it would've been nice to either display random colours, or to do some value based colours. For instance, when you have one button to make it bigger, and one to make it smaller, you can set it to blue when the cube is at its smallest, green when it is at 50%, and red when it's at its biggest. And of course at 10% it has to be 80% blue and 20% green since it's 1/5th between blue and green.
This would require pwm signals though (as far as I'm aware). Or addressable RGB leds, but where's the fun in that :p
If you're lighting the array with multiplexing you could do with 12 pwm pins. The Adafruit PCA9685 16-Channel Servo Driver might be an option if you need to extend the amount of pwm ports, but I'm not sure if it's fast enough.
You could also use only 3 pwm outputs, but this would mean that all buttons in the same row would display the same colour, which (depending on how you use it) might be a problem.

If you're planning on doing that, please reply. I'd love to see you do that. (of course I'll subscribe to be automatically notified when you upload it)

[workethicrecords]

Cutting leads before soldering sounds like a really tedious and harder way to do things