Having ditched the idea of making a Knobome and instead resigning myself to the possibility I’ll just have a Viewnome, I’ve now decided that I’m back in the hunt. But I’m simplifying things.

My plan now, due to the lack of space and the huge complexity that seemed to be coming from the previous discussion, is to build almost an “etcha-sketch” type of interface.

In my current state, I have two sets of 8 wires, that come from the IDC headers. I know that shorting any wire from 1 set with any wire on the other set will fire a button press in the Serial.

So my plan is simple.

I will attach 1 set of the 8 wires, to the 8 legs of an 8 position rotary switch. I will attach the other set of 8 wires to the legs of another 8 position rotary switch. I will then take the single out from the two switches and join them together at a momentary switch.

So using this little box, you will turn the two switches to the coordinates you want, and press the momentary button. That will trigger a button press at that coordinate.

Yes I know it’s simple. That’s really the aim. I can see this being useful for things where pressing lots of buttons isn’t the important thing and where change a row’s value at a time might be useful – like sliders or triggers.

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?

Unsped Shield Parts.

LED Matrix from Sparkfun, and 8 pots.

The idea is to use the OOTB unsped shield. Wire the LED side of it to the matrix, which I am assuming should be fairly straight forward. Then find a way to wire the 8 pots so that each one controls a row with the full left to full right turn being equal to columns 1 – 8.

One issue I’ve already thought of is the serial is expecting button press and button releases, the pots can only register a single value, unless I can find some way to “fire” an on/off signal, this might need a tweak to the serial (which may or may not (I expect may) be a show stopped for this project).