noizZze

Two weeks ago my dad has finished another project for me — Monome clone. I wanted it to be different from what’s offered by the respected authors in some ways, and it is obviously cheaper to build it than purchasing the read-made piece from them (of course if you have all necessary tools to carve nice rubber buttons, case, face plates etc).

For those who don’t know, Monome is a USB device with 64, 128, 256 etc number of buttons with LEDs inside each. Buttons can be lid and key events (presses and releases) are sent over the USB to a computer program that does something useful. Classical applications are:

• Controlling a MIDI device (synthesizer, sequencer, sampler etc)
• Visualizing data with LEDs

Here’s what we’ve got as the result:

Features:

• Red wood polished case
• Plastic buttons of increased size (to match the size and spacing of faders on my mixer)
• Soft rubber pads under the buttons for pleasant touch
• Ultra-bright blue LEDs
• Modified firmware to support hardware blinking

And here’s the device in action:

Additionally, I wrote a simple but nice Ableton Live driver to talk to the device, and now enjoying the creative potential of this little thing fully. Currently working on my live set.

THE OFFER

And now something really exciting. It’s probable that we will be building this on demand. Currently there are plans for 64 and 128 button models. We found that the same components are cheaper here and every part of the body is produced in-house making the overall cost visibly lower.

If you have interest in ordering one, leave a comment with a note. Currently we need about 10 orders of the type to launch the production cycle. If there is necessary demand, I will put together a page with the counter and some other helpful info to keep all interested parties informed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 20:59 and is filed under Music, Graphics, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.