Blatant self promotion, but my friend and I just launched an LED cube kit on Kickstarter [1] which you might be interested in (no soldering). It's just the outermost LEDs on three sides, but the idea is similar, you create all sorts of animations in just a few lines of Python, e.g. use 4D noise to create a digital lava lamp effect etc. Also every component exposes a REST endpoint, so you can use other languages too.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1202256831/lumicube-an-...