WHDTS LED Cubic Crystal Ball DIY Kits DIY Electronics Soldering Kits Funny DIY STC12C5A60S2 for Soldering Practice Learning

Got this for my cats to enjoy – being cats, I ended up liking it more than them… This kit will definitely test your patience, but the end result is well worth it! It took me about 15 minutes to assemble the main circuit board, and roughly 2 hours to assemble eight (8) LED rings, and another 2 hours for final assembly. Fired right up when complete – no debugging  If you don’t know how to solder before starting this kit, you definitely will by the end! Suggest you have at least some basic soldering skills before starting, but kit is excellent way to learn/refine soldering skills! Noticed some other reviewers complained about instructions. However, I found then completely adequate if you take some time to read and comprehend them. My best suggestions are to: 1. Don’t remove paper from the laser cut template. If you leave the paper on it is easier to see what you’re doing and to mark rings 1-6 with pen/Sharpie etc. (see photo) 2. Consider using alligator clips to hold LED leads while soldering them in template (see photo) 3. Use the laser cut template to your advantage! I found it very helpful to re-install rings into the jig/template when building each successive layer. If you do a trial fit, it’s much more precise to tweak the LED legs (see photo) 4. While explained in the instructions; probably worth noting: All LED ring ANODE pins are connected to one another in each ring while CATHODE pins are individual per ring. When assembling rings vertically, the CATHODE pins of one column of LEDs connects to the ones above and below ultimately connecting to PC board unmarked ring of pads. The ANODES of each ring are then then connected to the Y0-Y7 PCB terminals. The 1/8 phono jack is for music input provides a psychedelic 3D VU meter. It only operates on certain modes (I believe there are about 7 dedicated music input modes - you’ll know which ones) since only four (4) LEDS on bottom are illuminated (in absence of music input)… Use MP3 player to feed audio source to globe for light show. You’ll of course need Y jack to split out audio for playback… There’s an IR remote included, but I didn’t really see need for it unless you put in remote location that’s hard to get to. There’s a momentary switch on the PC board that can step through various display modes. Speaking of modes, there are many interesting display modes. Some “fireworks”, “raindrops”, round and round, up and down spirals etc. See other posts for videos  Overall, really nice kit to not only learn/hone soldering and electronic assembly skills. The PC board is high quality with plated thru holes and kit came with quite a few extra LEDS which would be super handy if you made a mistake on a ring or two… The end product is very visually appealing with multiple “playback options” and is perfect father-son project or for anyone interested in electronics.

I picked up this kit to ensure our COVID blues had an outlet in learning for my 10 yr old. The instructions were clear, with decent pictures, but of course there is room for improvement in bulleting steps rather than leaving that to be interpreted from the pictures. After several hours and nights of him working on it and me helping resolve mistakes and shorts, the resulting color sequences were outstanding in reward. For those wanting to take this on.. the real difficulty is in the balloon shaping and preventing shorts when younger kids are assembling. My son making mistakes and resolving them with my son was frustrating for him but valuable. My recommendation would be to offer more ideas on other shapes that may be easier in assembly but are still attractive in the light show... Something like a uniform cylinder or cube. great toy - great value - great for teaching and practicing soldering skills.

It's a great looking kit. The only thing I didn't like was that there are no paper instructions,you have to use a pdf file. The company is very good with customer service and quick to respond.

I really don't want to rate this kit too harshly, I can see a lot of honest effort went into making it, and I've assembled other kits from this seller with no problems at all. But as I said in the review title, I couldn't finish this kit. It began to feel masochistic in working on it. I'm a DIY hobbyist and basement tinkerer, and I enjoy soldering circuits and seeing them come to life when I power them up. It is simply a LOT of manual labor to build this kit. You're point-to-point soldering a lot of LEDs in a very unconventional fashion. I now understand why DIY hobbyists tend to stick with cube geometry when it comes to three dimensional LED structures. First off, the kit is well measured in quantity. You'll get some extra components, mostly LEDs, if you make mistakes. This seller has been great about sending me a PDF of the instruction manual for all the kits I've bought from them, without my needing to ask for one. This kit was no exception. Broken English aside, the manual is well written, with only one nuance that confused me: You solder the LEDs from anode to anode, which you bend so they're perpendicular to the cathode before soldering. This kit comes with a laser-cut jig (a piece of plastic with a lot of holes that snugly hold LEDs) that you use to hold and position LEDs in their correct orientation so you end up with a circular array of LEDs. Then you need to "stack" your circular arrays by soldering the cathodes to one anther, with the bottom-most set of cathodes going into the PCB. Here's the nuance that confused me: One photo in the manual clearly shows an LED anode being soldered to the cathode of a different LED. That made me worry I'd been soldering the LEDs incorrectly. The frustration from that, along with trying to line everything up to solder, just made me give up on this project. While the manual has a TON of photos to try and help you, there's just so many leads from the LEDs everywhere it's confusing to look at. There's also a thin white wire that the manual is very unclear on how and where it's supposed to be installed. Honestly, I think I'll try learning Arduino coding again and making a simple LED cube matrix before I ever decide to even try finishing this kit. If unique point to point soldering numerous times over sounds fun to you, maybe you'll enjoy this kit. I thought I would, but that didn't turn out to be the case. I don't blame the seller for any of this, I think they did their best in trying to write instructions for this kit, it's just a lot of detail to take in, and a lot of high precision handwork, not just in soldering but in bending the LED leads.

Enjoyed building this! Its great if you have patience and the preset patterns look awesome. The included template works great, but it does take a little bit of creativity to figure out how to fit everything together. I couldnt bring myself to solder the vertical cathodes on the outside of the LEDs like in the instuctions, so i did it backwards and i think it looks way better. The kit came with about 25 extra LEDs and since there are extra outputs on the board, i made another ring of 16 LEDs, soldered it in, and it worked!