I’ve considered the monome to be a potential gold mine for Children and learning games. The main reason it the simplicity. Buttons you press, lights that light up. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Things like monogression with it’s simple progression and pattern learning games:

Monogressions (Pattern Progressions on a Monome) from Mike Cohen on Vimeo.

More traditional games like lights out or (blackout):

lights out on the monome 40h from joseph melnyk on Vimeo.

Throw in an accelerometer and you’ve got a whole new range of possibilities:

Tilty Snake from squidie on Vimeo.

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.