Oops, I broke it in half again.

@salec commented that I was single-tentacly creating a new Moore's Law for LED Cubes.

Hehe, he has a point. Luckily though, with the next generation of 0201s thats as far as it goes. Its highly doubtful discretes will ever get any smaller and still be available to hackers...

First up, I managed to avoid the problems I was having with insulation by changing the wiring sequence. This was only possible by gluing the LEDs, although I think I can make a jig for that too, and go back to metal tape.

These LEDs are the same size as the legs of regular components. Very easy to make a castellated bar to wrap the wires on, all identical.

I ran out of red LEDs to complete a cube with, these really do not like to be messed with and die with little provocation. They are one-shot. So I switched to the blue, and printed out a motivational template.

The electronics measure 4.5mm, but its sat on a 5mm chip of plastic as a bearer.

26 pieces, 5x5.

I'm going to be doing these in my sleep soon.

Still 5mm, still cant believe I managed it..

I scratched my head trying to think of an easy way to cable these, and then remembered a piece of PATA EIDE cable. It has 80 cores in the space of 40, and they are solid copper. Perfect...

Gluing , stacking, stitching the layers together.

Testing... All still 100% perfect, I've been doing this every step to avoid finding a short when its too late.

Typically, the very last solder joint bridged. Maybe I was getting excited. Maybe its just a pain in the ass. I dunno, but this always happens. It wouldnt shift, and eventually the LED fell out. So I pulled the wires out straight, held the LED in tweezers and bravely soldered the anode to the crosswire and pushed it back, then folded the cathode wire back and beaded them.

One is now slightly conky, in the bottom back left corner. I know its there... OK so its 98.4375% perfect, dammit. ;-p

I found some series resistors and fitted a pin header for the Mega.

But unfortunately it wont program and I dont know why... I'll get to the bottom of it.

It still nearly works correctly. There's already a propeller sketch inside the Mega for the previous cube, but the wiring's different.

I got a bit of video, I'll  crack it tomorrow.

Kind of working. The software isnt yet, but thats still a record. :-D