monome to iDevice won’t work without some hardware modifications. It seems to me that the second-easiest (though obviously still not easy) way to achieve this goal would be to design a new logic board for the grid/arc that can speak USB class-compliant MIDI; basically, modify the circuit and firmware to cut the FTDI chip out of it.
But then, doing this would also require updating the various modules’ firmware and as well as serialosc (and/or individual apps?), otherwise the device would be designed out of its own ecosystem.
The direction to take with serialosc is non-trivial, and though I haven’t looked at any of the module firmware, I would suspect that it’s all operating at the serial protocol level, and adding midi on top of that may be considered too much overhead. Same with the midi protocol itself— mapping onto note-on and note-offs makes sense for individual buttons, but then you’d lose the compact tidiness of the row, column, and map messages. That could all be done over sysex, though, and serialosc could theoretically still just map the usb midi + sysex to the osc world on desktop… Not an insurmountable task, but not small either.
I’ve bounced the idea of taking this on as a side project back and forth in my head a few times over the past 6 months or so, but it’s never been compelling enough (or light-weight enough, given the ecosystem issues) to actually decide to take it on. If someone else decides to give it a go and spin a group buy out of it, I’d be interested in participating.
The easiest option, of course, is to buy two launchpads (and some Xanax to relax your aesthetic sensibilities whenever you want to use them)
