acheiving transhumanism one step at a time

today, i assembled my monome 40h kit! it’s essentially the same as a 64, but comes in kit form – 2 PCBs and all the pieces that need to go on it – ATmega chip, shift registers, FTDI serial to USB, button pads, etc. The only thing it doesn’t come with is LEDs. These you must find on your own. I ordered these from LEDShoppe, and so far i’m not extremely impressed with their consistency (brightness) from bulb to bulb. However, the color is beautiful (violet).  I failed to realize this while constructing her, but the LEDs are in fact all UV Blacklight LEDs, which is kind of cool — not really something I am into, but once i finish construction of the enclosure w/sensors, I will probably sell this monome and I think the UV aspect will be appealing to others.

It took me about 2.5 / 3 hours total, at which point i plugged her in, to discover that one LED was burnt out, and entire row would not respond to button presses. It took me a while to de-solder and remove the dead LED and replace it, but i did, and it works. the row, however, i believe is a circuit problem, and I’m waiting to hear back from Brian Crabtree (inventor of monome) to see what’s up. other than that, it works great, and looks great. The hardest part of the process was soldering 64 surface mount diodes on the button pad PCB. I didn’t expect to have to do anything that tiny. Luckily I got a Weller soldering iron and a couple 0.8mm tips. nothing beats a fresh tip. here are some more images from the process.

__________ the 40h comes with 4 ANALOG inputs that are just waiting to be sensorized. I am considering a capacitance touch sensor, or possibly an IR rangefinder, or maybe even just a potentiometer(s) to have some knobs. the most common is an accelerometer, so that the monome has tilt control. My 64 has this, so i probably will not do that. I still have to build an enclosure (obviously) and what sensors i choose to install will determine what the enclosure looks like. i’m excited.