I’m gonna take some old floppy cables and ata66 cables and chop em up for my connectors. Hopefully that will work.

What’s your plan for the enclosure?

I was going to aim for a 27k based on input from this thread…

http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=2285&page=1#Item_17

The diodes shipped out yesterday so I should have them in a day or so.

Cables, soldering kit, some breadboards, spare wires of various sizes, crocodile clips and anything else that looks neat I will also be picking up from my local radio shack probably this afternoon. I’m off work for the next 5 days so I’m hoping to make some progress with my first setup.

So did you get the same LEDs as me?

digikey# 511-1611-ND
http://parts.digikey.com/1/parts/1381671-led-3mm-468nm-blue-transparent-slr343bc7t3f.html

If so– how did you calculate what resistor you need?

I thought we were supposed to go off the chart on the arduino page: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/MAX72XXHardware#SelectRSet

It says:
20mA 3.0V –> 24.5kOhm
20mA 3.5V –> 22.6kOhm

So we’d need ~23.5kOhm. Right?

Also– did you buy the serial ATA looking cables to attach the shield to the arduino? If so where’d you get em?

They don’t list em in the hardware list– but you can see em plain as day in this pic:
http://bricktable.wordpress.com/30/pictures/dsc_0091/