Hopefully this will be of help to someone.

I need a faceplate, and I need one fast. I need to get my somewhat flimsy setup into some sort of enclosure so it doesn’t all fall to pieces. The final enclosure can wait, I need something now and I need something fast.

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.

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.

Bloom iPhone Application from Lawrence Brown on Vimeo

I have a fair share on iphone music making apps. This one has a certain Eno twist. Check it out.

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.

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas from ∆LEX on Vimeo.

I love this sort of stuff.

Nerdscroll is mirrored, which is pretty weird.

Simplest musical test available, also demo’s some of the shorts I was having, they are now fixed. The 2nd from left column is the one that the LED’s don’t work, but as you can see from the video the buttons do.

Spectrum Analyser

(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?

The other row, see previous post with 2 rows out. I had the 4 cable pairs reversed. I don’t have the same issue with this row. This row I’m getting nothing at all, just blank. No cross talk, no button press issues, just dead.

I’m trying to meter things, but I’m having a hard time working out what should show Ohm values when and if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Using the monome test, with the arduinomeserial running, I can now get handshakes going on. Press a button, the monome test recognises it, press the test cell to light a led and up it comes.

I do however still have a problem column. That right hand column (which I think is actually the bottom one maybe). It still doesn’t light on power up and the scrolling horizontals. And now I’m getting 1 or both led’s in the column dimly light and flicker gently when you light one from another column.

I’ve fiddled around and pulled and pushed, poked at it with a meter – but quickly came to the conclusion I have no idea what I need to be looking at.

Is there any indication from the above whether this is a board, a board edge wiring, a break off or a sheild issue?

What are the best trouble shooting steps once you get to this stage. I’m assuming I should be able to meter test A & B and that will show whether I have a short at point X.

I’m going to dedicate as much time as possible this weekend to getting this thing running – that and try and work out how to make a quick and easy temporary front panel maybe just using a sheet of ply with the correct squares drilled – need to find a decent template for that, which I think I saw the other day on the monome forums.