Building Monome clone in 2017/2018

General
#1

My last monthly project of 2017 has been (still is) building DIY monome clone; so far I’ve build one based on sparkfun pcb (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8033) that’s fully working (talking to serialosc and all that stuff), and I just assembled one based on adafruit pcb (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1616) — I should have software ready soon.
I also designed (in code) and 3d printed case for the sparkfun one, and I’m gonna make another one for the adafruit, and publish everything soon :slight_smile:

Some progress pics/videos:

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DIY monome compatible grid w/ Adafruit NeoTrellis
#2

nice work! 2007 vibes!!

curious to see how the adafruit mod turns out.

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#3

::drool:: I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but don’t have the engineering skillz. OTOH, I could definitely follow a build guide :slight_smile:

#4

I bought the adafruit pcb + buttons a while ago and was thinking about experimenting with the MCP2221A for usb. should be fun!

I’m especially curious about using a 4x4 grid for making music.

#5

So just a small update, this project got a bit out of hand — I had some problems with serialoscd on my High Sierra where it would stop sending messages if it got flooded by some app (like meadowsphysics), so I kinda wrote my own thing in nodejs that simulates serialoscd and is mext-compatible (only with 8x8 grids), I plan on cleaning everything up, setting up a README and pushing it to github first, and then writing blog post once I have more time.

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#6

Finally wrote a README and published the repo: https://github.com/szymonkaliski/diy-monome – blog post coming next :slight_smile:

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#7

Very cool!

These boards are not a replacement for official monome build (that is much nicer hardware, and supports variable brightness), but just a DIY project.

What about adjusting the brightness of the LEDs using pulse-width modulation? Might be too noisy, but could work.

#8

Yeah that should be possible on the sparkfun one, but I stopped working on it since trellis one is smaller and fully working right now :wink: might revisit it at some point though,

#9

I finally documented the whole process in long blog post: http://szymonkaliski.com/blog/2018-01-28-diy-monome/

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#10

First sentence:

I remember when the first monome came out around 2017

Don’t think this is really true :wink:

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Nótt - norns&mlr-inspired standalone looper