Are you looking for a new project and have 3 or 4 months to dedicate to it this 3D LED Spectrum Analyser Project by Pianistos might be just the ticket. If you don’t have access to some of the equipment that he has it could take even longer though! He is able to make a bunch of jigs that allow him to quickly place and solder hundreds of connections where if you were using helping hands they would not be as accurate and would take 10 times as long. You can grab the software here if you are thinking of building your own. You can see it in action below with some amazing piano work by the project builder.
“I found the 8x8x8 ledcube project really cool but I did not want to blindly copy it because it would not have been new. After thinking a bit I got an idea to build a 3D spectrum analyser that reacts to music and here is the result! It is amazing to play piano with it.
HolKann (alias) is a friend of mine who wrote the code for this project. After I built the spectrum analyser I asked him to help me with the programming and he was happy to work on the project! It was a learning experience for both of us. Of course I had to have an idea on how and what should be programmed before building this thing but I needed someone to write an optimal code in order for the microprocessor to execute the algorithms at the desired speed. After some evenings of programming we finally got this thing working. We squeezed all juices out of the microprocessor to get a refresh rate of 80 fps and a beat response of about 12ms (the time it takes to process the audio signal and to show it visually)! If there is no input signal for longer than 1 minute the spectrum analyser turns off automatically.”