Stray Technologies aka Vblank, has finished up doing his bliptronic to blipnome arduino conversion, and has made available a $70 kit to do the conversion including 4 pots which control ADC in Arduinomeserial.

This is such an awesome project and something I’ve been hoping someone would crack since the Blips first came out.

I’ve ordered two, the second one is to work on a dream of mine, and that’s a eurorack mounted monome interface.

It fits a treat, I just need to find a faceplate with the correct holes, as the blip case isn’t ideal as it’s plastic and curved with speaker holes.

My Bliptronics arrived today the day after ordering from Thinkgeek (one of the joys of sharing a state with them), after the earlier press they got on Create Digital Music, I was very excited to immediately take one of them to pieces.

Need to find myself a magnifying glass and look at the IC’s in use.

At forst glance it looks very promising. It’s not my dream which was 2 16 pin headers coming off the button board, one for buttons one for LED’s and all the brains in the logic board. It looks like some of the brains is pre headers, so there are only 16 of them.

But I’m sure once some bright spark has worked out what those 3 IC’s do, and what the 16 pins need to plug into, this could be a viable button pad for a 40h kit or an arduinome. It’s perfect for an arduinome, as it’s an enclosure with button pads and some extra space for pots to connect to the arduino all for $50 which is about the price I paid for my machined 40h faceplate alone.

It’s zero threat to Monome™ as it still has no competition with this, the buttons and the build are easily 10 times less – which since it’s 10 times cheaper is no surprised. It’s chinese made, rather than the Monome™’s all American local resourced ethically happy build.

I have two spares, which two lucky friends will get for Christmas, I’m hoping this can be the new button pad for my old old arduinome, I built back in the day.

More info as I get it.

The wood is a little dinged, and I’d probably say that the plywood base makes it look very prototype, but it’s an enclosure and that’s really all that matters right now. All I need to get the project finished is my type-A to type-A usb cable (due any day). Then I can start playing with this some more.

When we first put it together we used the full height of the side wood, so it was about 1.5″ higher than it needed to be. I just trimmed it down an inch, but it seems that with the height of the inside panel and the headers and idc cables I’ve not left enough room for it to fit.

So I’m left with two options. This weekend, I either cut a new box – which now we have the right tools and a first pass shouldn’t be too difficult, or I stop using the Unsped shield in it’s mounted format and try and find some connectors so I can have them side by side. I think I’d rather do that – it’s just a matter of finding an easy way to do the connections. If that fails I’ll cut and glue a new box, ready for spraying.

The box is currently 3″ deep, so I’m thinking of trimming an inch off the bottom to reduce the height. The aim is to spray it with a non slip black spray I found – which seems to very closely match the finish of my black mac book which it will be paired with. Combined with the black faceplate and bright blue LED’s I do have to say it’s rather dandy looking.

My next step is to start working out which apps I need, and start familiarizing myself with them – so expect a fair amount of 101 style write-ups and walk thrus over the next few weeks.

In parallel, I think I might start soldering the second 64 set I have, but in a 4×16 arrangement.

I’ll get some pictures of the box tonight.

For that reason I decided tonight to whip out the dremel and try to slice up some thin particle board to at least have something to hold everything together.

I have a copy of the machine collective PDF with the sparkfun dimensions. I printed a copy out at full size, trimmed off the excess paper, and my idea was simple. Just cut the holes out with the dremel. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to have the buttons fit through the hole and not interfere with the up and down action.

As you can see, this is clearly not going to be the 20 minute job I thought it would be.

My initial idea (due to my lack of tracing paper) was to poke holes through the paper that I could then follow as a guide. I couldn’t see them due to the very speckley nature of the particle board.

So I figured I could just cut through the paper as a template. 2 minutes in with a bunch of holes and drags I thought I wasn’t far off.

Turn it over and, yeah that won’t work.

I’m now fairly confident that there is no such thing as a quick faceplate. It requires time and effort. My battons idea quickly turned into a measuring nightmare.

The only solution I think would be somewhat easy for quick faceplate would be to find batton the width of the ones I have, but half the height and then stick the horizontal onto the vertical. You’ll have a faceplate with two levels, but it won’t need any measuring or cutting and it will hold the buttons in place. I can’t however find such a pre cut thing. All the dowels I could find where square – so I’d be into cutting batons (and I’ll b back at the beginning).

I have ordered a faceplate kit from Machine Collective. I’ve asked for one with a thicker top plate made out of black Perspex™. Hopefully it will come quickly (if I’d planned ahead my parents could have brought it over to the States in their hand luggage for their visit on Wednesday). As it is I’ll pay postage and hope I get it mid/end of next week.