Knobome Display #1 from JP Sykes on Vimeo.

Finally found some time in between flu forced naps to finish off the display portion of the knobome idea. Now all I need to do is stuff this into the small looking enclosure I have and then work out what I’m planning on doing for an input. LyodMilligan has some very promising ideas over on the other post. Although he very quickly got me out of my depth in terms of technical know how, so I’m hoping he’s going to throw me a lifeline before I start drowning. I also suspect I might run out of room. For that reason I’m thinking I might go with a simple 2 x 8 position rotary switch and a small momentary switch.

Twist the 2 rotary switches to the 8×8 co’ordinates you want and press the button to trigger a press.

I should be able to get away with that with nothing more than some imaginative wiring and no additional components – but we’ll see.

Then I might approach the knobome enclosure slightly differently.

Original inspiration for the knobome is the orange keypadless monome (except if I’m correct Tehn’s has no monome input, other than maybe ADC or ENC), video of his in prototype.

Update, it took a great deal of trimming, pushing and bending, but it’s all inside the enclosure now. Absolutely no room for switches or knobs. So this one will become a viewNome. Knobome will need a bigger house.

My issue wasn’t with the shield soldering or my pin selection, is was that I’d stupidly used Arduino v12 to compile and upload the firmware, and as we all should know by now, that won’t work, you need arduino v11.

So I was able to crocodile clip a couple of pins as per Unspeds response on the forum…

IN
15,13,11,09,07,05,03,01
16,14,12,10,08,06,04,02

OUT
02,04,06,08,10,12,14,16
01,03,05,07,09,11,13,15

(the positive side of the led’s to the SEG pins on the max72xx chip)
connect led matrix pins: 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12
to arduinome pins 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16 on the “IN” connector

(the negative side of the led’s to the DG pins on the max72xx chip)
connect led matrix pins: 1,2,3,4,21,22,23,24
to arduinome pins 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16 on the “OUT” connector

Now I just need to find a nice solution to wire up to the led matrix, I think I’ll end up just soldering directly to the matrix a pair of ribbon cables.

Now once I had my matrix working with the test, I fired up monome_test to see out of curiosity what would happen if I wired one of my potentiometer between the two pins that used to be wired to a button. Well stuff happened, not really what I want, but it was interesting. I’ll take a video and post it over the weekend – not easy to explain.

Suffice to say I need some ideas for plugging 1 potentiometer per row and getting full left to full right equal 0 – 8 column button presses. Any thoughts?

Had the absolute pleasure of coming home to not only 2 full logic and button kits from Monome for my Christmas vacation 128 project, but also 2 Stribe 1′s to add to the festive spirit.

I’ll get some decent pictures over the next day of both and get them on flickr and here.

The stribes look great and I can’t wait to play with them and see what I can do to add them to my arsenal. I do have one “gripe” (I use air quotes since I’m reaching, they are beautifully made and look great). I wish they came with a shield, I’d have paid an extra $10 or so for an arduino shield that I could solder 2 sets of header pins into and pushed straight into an arduino and then plugged the header straight into it. That’s teh one bit of the the whole piece of hardware that doesn’t seem well thought out. You have these lovely sleek perspex enclosed things, and then you have to plug the ribbon cable into a separate arduino that is just hanging out, and then plug that into your computer. I’m toying mentally with the idea of either integrating them with the 128 faceplate, or making them hot plug with the 128 so I keep the arduino in there plugged into the usb hub I’ll have in there. That way I plug the stribe into the Monome and the Monome into the computer, Ideally I’d love for it to be integrated, but them I’m concerned that the two are joined at the hip, we’ll see, long way to go.

Monome kits I’m very excited about, looking forward to having a smaller more nimble friend for my big ole’ Arduinome. I ordered my green LED’s from Jameco, and am now in the hunt for a 128 faceplate in aluminum with no visible screw holes. If anyone has any sources let me know, if and when I find something I’ll post it here. The plan is to try and get 80% of the boring soldering done ASAP – mainly the logic boards. Then hand the partially constructed work to my wife to wrap and tease me under the tree for the next 3 weeks. Come xmas I know what I’m doing.

More info and images coming very soon.

Huge thanks to Tehn at Monome for making the kits possible and to Josh for the Stribes.

Auduino from Tinker.it! on Vimeo.

Auduino is based on the Arduino board. The audio is coming direct from Arduino PWM output with only a slight external reverb. No other effects were used.

Construction details and code here:
code.google.com/p/tinkerit/

Stribe1: Touchstrip + LED Bargraph Display from CuriousInventor on Vimeo.

The Stribe 1 has been launched and it looks really nice. I love the fact that it’s modular. $94 a pop, means you could pick one up a month and after 8 months you’d have a nice looking piece of kit.

I’m curious to see what’s needed above and beyond just having the modules. How much you need to do to get it working with the arduino and what max patches are available. I’m already thinking that a arduinome 64 with 2 or 3 of these strips off the side in the same enclosure could be pretty neat and very useful. I wonder if there will (or is) any cross fade patches yet. I’m very tempted to get a couple.

If you’re planning on building a Monome clone – Arduinome or similar you have a new life saver, the now famous Unsped is releasing a limited edition run of his amazing and time saving shield. It is highly recommend as a starting point for these sorts of projects.

Arduinome First Full Test from JP Sykes on Vimeo.

Finally managed to sort out all the bugs. The Arduinome is now fully functional. Now we move onto creating the enclosure.

More videos here.

OK, super weird additional findings – boy this is a lot of fun

So I got my proper 16 pin IDC cables today, which I hooked up and now my duff column is working. But this seems to have exposed some awesome craziness. Now if I got into arudinonme serial and do the test, I get them all lite up – woot I said. Then I noticed that in my monome test that was in the background I was getting crazy button presses being fired. Not touching anything, but with monome test set to toggle, as I start lighting up leds eventually I hit critical mass and monome test starts fireing button presses and led’s start turning off.

Out of curiosity I also fired up nerdscroll to see if my mirror issues was still occuring and it is.

Which made me look again at the break off board.

It seems I have the LED lights pin set upside down (the top one of the pair the one with the sets of 4 wires connecting to it..

I have mine…

bottom top…
8 – 1
16 – 9

Whereas looking at the diagrams again, I think it’s supposed to be

bottom top
1 – 8
9 – 16

I’m assuming I can’t fix that with turning the cable round since that will make the left and right sides switched as well.

So tomorrow evening I will resolder the break off panel and try again.

As much as it’s still buggy, I do feel closer than I was 2 hours ago. At least now all the lights light up.

(please excuse the awful quality video, the lighting here is bad, and I’m using a cheap flip video – better videos to come)

The last row that won’t light up. I tried to poking around. If I have it set so every led is on, that row dosn’t light up. if I short out tat rows 2 pins on the 4 pin ribbon (that’s LED-GND3 and SWT- GND3 the row lights up. If I short out SWT GND3 and LED GND4 next to it the row alos lights up. I can’t see any shorts and the joints seem sound all the way up to the shield.

Does this indicate anything to anyone?

Until now I’ve been using an old 44 pin hard drive cable for connecting my shield to my break away board.

Last night I discovered I needed to reverse the way it was attached, and I couldn’t get it to fit since there is a chip on one side. After butchering the connectors so it was only 10 wide, it worked, but the IDC connector is falling to pieces.

So I figured I should really just order some proper connectors rather than ghetto hacking it.

Thanks to the tip from the monome boards I ordered some from All Electronics.

RBBN CBL CONN 16 PIN FEMALE I ordered 10

20 CONDUCTOR RIBBON CABLE 10 feet

Total Cost: $15.50

Hopefully it’ll make the thing more securely wired once it’s all in a box and being moved about and beaten up.