itsagrid 64/128 - a DIY monome compatible grid

What is it?

It's a grid.

Specifically a DIY version of monome grid instruments, fully compatible with existing monome patches and software.

itsagrid is an adaptation of the Adafruit Trellis board with the a rubber button grid from Livid Instruments (no longer made by Livid - but still available via a couple online sources) and using a Teensy 3.2 microcontroller. The pcb was redesinged for a larger button spacing, SMD leds, mounting for Teensy, and added a driver chip for variable LED brightness.

itsagrid varibright

itsagrid software started as a fork of the Trellinome portion of the DIY monome project by szymonkaliski. The hardware has now been extended to use a PWM chip to get variable brightness of the LEDs

As with the Trellis boards, adjacent pcbs are connected via the SDA, SCL, GND, 5V and INT pads on each board (learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-trellis-diy-open-source-led-keypad). Four pcbs are used for 64 grid, eight for a 128 grid. Each pcb as a set of jumpers that need to be configured for unique addressing of the i2c driver chips (buttons and leds).

Due to driver chip address limitations in the current design, only 8 boards can be used together for a total of 128 buttons.

mext

The mext protocol is used for serial communication - the same that is used in most recent monome devices.

See szymonkaliski's github for more technical details of his build figuring out the mext/OSC communication.

serialosc / libmonome

serialosc is required for serial communication with computers and OSC devices. libmonome is basically driver code which also facillitates monome serial communication.

You can get both serialosc and libmonome code from monome github page, and building them is well documented on official linux docs (they work for macOS as well), read part 2 Preparing your system: serialosc (ignoring the sudo apt-get - I was missing liblo, but it's available on homebrew): monome.org/docs/linux/.

Note - there is a serialosc patch szymonkaliski included with his build which may be needed on MacOS.

Case / Panel

Prototype case is laser cut acrylic top and bottom panels and some spacers. Laser files will be posted with other hardware details later.

References

https://github.com/szymonkaliski/diy-monome (MIT License) https://github.com/TheKitty/Untz_Monome (MIT License)

Libraries

This project uses versions of the following which have been modified for use with the Teensy i2c_t3 library and additional TLC59116 functionality.

Adafruit Trellis Library https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Trellis_Library

TLC59116 Library by Majenko Technologies https://github.com/MajenkoLibraries/TLC59116 Copyright (c) 2014, Majenko Technologies