Spent 20-30 minutes last night getting all the LED’s in place and soldered. Just need to get the diodes in and then we’re onto the shield. No pictures I’m afraid, I’ll get some tonight.

I also found some nice and simple sparkfun PCB testing techniques to check for shorts. Probably all very 101, but I’ll work out how to relay the information and get it up here in case anyone else at my level is wondering the same thing.

I had a quick look over the unsped shield, slotted in some of the headers, but many of the holes in the pcb seemed alien to me, so I need to do some research and see if anyone has a good how-to for which components go where.

Updates:

Entartetemuzak has an awesome flickr shot, with everything annotated – many thanks !!!

Only had a couple of minutes this evening, but was keen to get the ball rolling so I soldered the diodes on one of the sparkfun boards.

Super easy going. Diodes are very clearly marked on the sparkfun pcb. There was a lot of legs to cut off, and I think I may need to go over them again later so they don’t stick in the buttons.

Next up is the LED’s. Which seem fairly safe as well. I also found a nice way to test for any shorts in my soldering (yes I still don’t trust it). With the diodes being uni-directional for current. If once it’s soldered in, take your meter on the ohm setting and touch the legs that if you can only get a reading in with your meter in one direction (i.e. red on the left one, black on right, then switch), you should be able to confidently say that you don’t have any cross leg solder shorts.

I’m hoping that once I have the LED’s and the diodes in place that there is some fairly simple means to test the connections — or maybe by then I might be more trusting of my soldering – it is easy going so far.

Didn’t have time to set up the timelapse, but I’ll get that sorted for tomorrows progress report.

Had a long weekend off over the weekend, so didn’t get much work done on the Nome, spent a lot of quality time at the beach or in restaurants.

I did get a chance to do some soldering warm up, whilst picking up a new soldering iron, I grabbed a couple of quick $10 velleman kits. I put together a metronome, which was a nice challenge due to the header for the chip, so hopefully that will have got some of the muscle memory back.

I now have all the parts I think I need, I’ll compile a static page to list them all over the next few evenings.

I’m planning on spending an hour or so every evening this week, working on LED’s and diodes. So aiming for next weekend having a finished unenclosed arduinome.

In true geeky fashion I’ve been thinking I might record timelapses of the process using gawker. But more on that later.

From what I can see you have three basic options if you want to go DIY for a monome.

Option 1:

You buy an official 40h kit from Monome.org and follow the instructions. You would at the end have a piece of hardware that should match exactly the 40h that is built and sold by monome.org.

The kit comes with everything you need (aside from an enclosure and the leds) for just over $250. The issue with option 1 is that the supply if very scarce. There is currently no indication of when they might be available again.

This is my ideal approach, but not knowing when they might go on sale again puts this on the back burner.

Option 2:

Buy all the parts and make your own 40h kit. This was an option I considered early on. But I was just very unsure about what bits I needed and assembly how to’s. The hardware areas I was confused by were where to get buttons from (could I just use the sparkfun ones, the monome ones are custom made for them), was there a pcb available for people to buy outside of the kit, and did I need anything else that wasn’t in general availability.

Option 3:

Build a clone hardware and use the ported firmware based on the arduino chip. I was able to find 3 or 4 step by step guides on building this. All of the hardware was easy to find on digikey and sparkfun – I was able to use the sparkfun buttons which are very available. The firmware update seems to be getting a large number of revisions (so I’m confident that it’l keep growing). Finally the arduino chip is supposed to be super friendly to program. So worse comes to worse I could always make something different.

My personality is very much in need of near immediate satisfaction. So Option 3 was the only real path where I could see I could have a functioning Arduinome (monome clone) in the next month without pay $1000 for one on ebay. So that is the route I will be taking.

If there are any “easier” routes to doing 1 or 2 I’m all ears, I’d love to here more.

Next post will detail what I will order, from where and how much.