Having done the hard part of soldering, let's get into Arduino connection and programming. Before connecting the positive leads, connect four negative layers to Arduino analog I/O ports A2 (bottom layer) through A5 (top layer). After that, 16 LED control pins needs to be connected to the Arduino board. Connect the first 14 pins to Arduino digital I/O ports 0 to 13. The remaining pins 15 and 16 need to be connected to Analog pins A0 and A1. See the following diagram for connection reference:
There are a few things that you should understand before programming your cube:
To address a single LED use a plane (layer) number 0–3, and an LED pin number 0–15. Turn the plane to LOW output (negative leg) and the LED pin number to HIGH (positive leg) to activate the LED.
Before activating a single LED, ensure all other planes are off by setting them to HIGH output. If you don't do this, the whole column of LEDs will light up instead of a single LED.