A friend told me once that her flatmate wanted to build a LED cube and I was like "pfff, I can do that..". I started to look for LEDs and stuff I would need, but had so much stuff laying around, that I said "use the stuff you already have" and harvested LEDs from a LED array of a flash light and used some big copper wires for the frame. My first Atmega8 was directly soldered in a messy way on perfboard - I corrected the dimensions and burned the atmega8 bootloader on it (including the auto reset "circuit" for the ftdi adapter).

That was 10months ago. Yesterday I finally joined the atmega8 board with the LEDs and programmed a crappy animation on it. Sometimes it feels good to not over engineer stuff and just go with it. 

TIP: if you have clear glass LEDs like me, use some white acrylic paint to diffuse them.