OcTinct: a rainbow Monome

JMG is busy with a really interesting electronics project. He's building a Monome clone (pronounced mon-ohm, not mono-mee, as I found out recently).

JMG is using components such as a keypad from SparkFun Electronics to build a 'Monome plus' of sorts. Instead of the single-colour LEDs of the original Monome, JMG's 8x8 OcTinct sports three-colour LEDs.


OcTinct running refmatrix from JMG on Vimeo.

This will open up all kinds of interesting possibilities--for instance, we could see a modification of the mlr patch that colours the 'cells' differently depending on their bass or percussive content. Or whole rows could be coloured according to special suffixes in the file names of the samples assigned to them, for 'at a glance' categorisation.

JMG is using the Arduino platform as the 'brain' of OcTinct. Arduino looks like a really attractive way to build a project like this. Check the friendly 'hello world' arduino tutorials here, maybe even an electronics dunce like me could build something with this system.

Follow JMG's progress on his blog.

While we're talking about Monome's, check this dazzling performance. And an outline of another DIY monome project here.