One of my first projects was to create a 5x5x5 LED cube with some LED’s I bought from Fry’s. I made a jig to hold each row to solder. Then stacked the rows. I used the Maxbots board that Mike created, and wired the LED’s to the board.
Here is a video making of the LED Charlieplexed Cube 5x5x5 from 2009.
This is the cube running a loop programmed in C.