Skull Cube is really a pretty simple art piece: it’s a skull in a cube. It moves around in there and lights itself up and other fun stuff, but that’s all extra.The first of these was given to charity, via my friend Onika’s annual international art auction. Of course, I had to have one for myself, so now there’s two of them. There are some differences in the finishing pattern on the outer shell and the mechanisms used to animate the taxidermy, but otherwise they are nearly identical.

Inside is a custom circuit board, a PIC microcontroller, a 24 channel LED controller, servos, a Li-ion battery charging circuit and a tilt switch for orientation and vibration sensing.

As usual, this is an open source project. Download file form the repository and make your own! It’s not very complete, but it has some handy code snippets.

The hole in the middle is where the lens aperture sits. I cut this one out with a CNC mill myself, and made the vias one by one with thin copper wire. Later copies were made with a regular PCB service.