From what I can see you have three basic options if you want to go DIY for a monome.

Option 1:

You buy an official 40h kit from Monome.org and follow the instructions. You would at the end have a piece of hardware that should match exactly the 40h that is built and sold by monome.org.

The kit comes with everything you need (aside from an enclosure and the leds) for just over $250. The issue with option 1 is that the supply if very scarce. There is currently no indication of when they might be available again.

This is my ideal approach, but not knowing when they might go on sale again puts this on the back burner.

Option 2:

Buy all the parts and make your own 40h kit. This was an option I considered early on. But I was just very unsure about what bits I needed and assembly how to’s. The hardware areas I was confused by were where to get buttons from (could I just use the sparkfun ones, the monome ones are custom made for them), was there a pcb available for people to buy outside of the kit, and did I need anything else that wasn’t in general availability.

Option 3:

Build a clone hardware and use the ported firmware based on the arduino chip. I was able to find 3 or 4 step by step guides on building this. All of the hardware was easy to find on digikey and sparkfun – I was able to use the sparkfun buttons which are very available. The firmware update seems to be getting a large number of revisions (so I’m confident that it’l keep growing). Finally the arduino chip is supposed to be super friendly to program. So worse comes to worse I could always make something different.

My personality is very much in need of near immediate satisfaction. So Option 3 was the only real path where I could see I could have a functioning Arduinome (monome clone) in the next month without pay $1000 for one on ebay. So that is the route I will be taking.

If there are any “easier” routes to doing 1 or 2 I’m all ears, I’d love to here more.

Next post will detail what I will order, from where and how much.