Lovers of the grid for music control now get to reenact the scene in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, stepping out of the world of black and white into one of color. The OhmRGB, the latest controller from Austin, Texas-based controller and custom hardware shop Livid Instruments, adds multicolor LEDs behind its array of controls.

We’ve already seen red, green, and yellow add color feedback on Novation’s Launchpad (and of course the APC line from Akai). The Livid piece bests Novation’s three colors with seven possibilities. For those who prefer their grids to come with knobs, faders, and crossfader, the OhmRGB has the same generous complement of controls that its (monochromatic) Ohm64 sibling does. It also has expansion ports for additional flexibility, plugs into USB connectivity and power without the need for drivers, and has extensive options for remapping lights, controls, and interaction, so it works dynamically not only with Ableton Live but any tool you like. Livid also does their woodwork and assembly in Austin, Texas – keeping the shop on-site was a wise business move, believe me.

In the top video, you can see artist Pailo do a quick demo; obviously, you could perform with this however you want. In the video below, the Livid gang explain a bit about how they’ve made the Ohm64 RGB work with Ableton Live:

This video is presented by Pailo and shows how you can use it with OhmModes, a sophisticated remote script for Ableton Live

Jay Smith from Livid has some other comments – and even those seven colors aren’t necessarily the limit:

Currently it supports 7 colors, we plan on adding more with a firmware update in the future. It has the same expansion jacks the Block [controller] has, we plan on making side cars for it later this year. Also we’ve added banking so you can save multiple mappings to the internal memory of the controller.

And here’s a video that shows why the expansion ports are cool:

Want one? Check it out at Livid Instruments:
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_ohmrgb.php

US$699, available now direct or via your dealer.

More RGB Action!

While Livid doesn’t make hardware that can be technically qualified as open source, they have built a strong relationship with the DIY community. Their software patches, built in Max/MSP, are available under an open source license, and their hardware is well-suited to hacking and modification. And beyond the finished products themselves, they’ve got a full-blown DIY platform called Builder and have generally built a good relationship with DIYers through their shop and interaction with the community.

All of that is to say, there’s a lot happening with exploring what grid controllers can be as hardware hackers and musicians take matters into their own hands. Unlike the OhmRGB, you can’t easily go out and buy one of these at the moment, but it’s fantastic to see the rainbow (ahem) of control experimentation out there.

Thanks in particular to Mutis Mayfield, aka Mudo de Nacimiento, who helped remind us of some of the major RGB grid efforts to date. Mudo himself is working a project, seen in the image below.

Clarification/correction: Mudo adds some notes on that project:

I had to say that the project in the picture wasn’t mine, to be exact I’m part of the project as a free-lancer taking the task of community management and concept designer for the software implementation with third party softwares.

This project started as a revision for the Octinct from Jonathan, Owen and Jordan whit the aim to give a Octinct unit to some artist at Hangar.org over workshop over the Sonar(matica) 2009 (these workshops were free admitance) but it was evolving into a new project (with new design for the boards) which is the one from the picture.

We expect more information on that project soon.

I have to start out with the insanely-awesome Polynome 5000. It’s about the dreamiest color controller I can imagine, a one-off monome by capricorn one, aka Los Angeles-based monome musician and inventor Colin Mann. Colin describes it thusly:

After more hours than I’d like to admit, even if I actually knew how many, I’m done. I started this, believe it or not, before the APC40 was even announced, and at the time there weren’t many products out there like it. Now, obviously it would make more sense to just buy one of those products, nevertheless, where are you gonna get an RGB monome with a nixie tube display that takes OSC commands? Exactly.

FEATURES
RGB monome (64 buttons, 64 colors)
6 slide faders
1 infrared sensor
1 touch strip sensor
4 arcade buttons (internally lit)
1 toggle switch
4 digit nixie tube display
12 button keypad
xlr microphone pass through
6 port usb hub (powered)
4 external power jacks
1 12VDC power output source

Don’t miss Colin’s huge post on the topic; see also video below.

http://www.capricorn1.net/avr/polynome-5000/

Next up, another DIY project — from artist and hacker BIM0X, the Rainbow:

Presentation of my new MIDI controller : the Rainbow.
Soft touch buttons Monome like, each one has a RGB Led inside.
64 buttons, 7 colours available. Based on midibox (www.ucapps.de)

Powered by PIC18F452. Completley independent, it doesn’t need a computer to work.
Midi and output via MIDI messages

Open source RGB grids?

Owen Vallis and Jordan Hochenbaum, aka FlipMu, have been working on their own open source project. It’s not just RGB – it’s also pressure-sensitive, a feature generally missing from these sorts of grid controllers, adding a whole new dimension of possible expression.

Owen shares some other comments, and walks us through yet more RGB and even pressure-sensitive projects:

The Livid stuff is always awesome I think. I’m all for more DIY or any open source projects. There have been a lot of RGB style button grids over the last several years, starting with the Octinct from Johnaton Guberman and Brad Hill ( <-- the original Arduinome Shield designer). The Octinct was finally made open source last year and is now being worked on by the guys at Hanger.org. There was also the RGB mini Monome by Grumpy Mike at the arduino forums (vimeo video), and also the Lumi from stanford which combined pressure and a touch screen using the spark fun RGB pads in a 4×8.

The Chronome is different (and has been taking so long) because it not only uses a Mega (hopefully allowing for expansion later), but also adds 64 independent pressure and RGB buttons. Trying to solve for noise on the ADC while lighting all 64 RGB leds was super hard to solve ….but it works now woop woop. The other major thing is that the Chronome works natively with SerialOSC from monome, and still works the exact same as a regular monome. The only difference is the Chronome also accepts an RGB message, and send an additional pressure message. This means the Chronome should work with all existing monome apps.

The Chronome, based on the open-source Arduinome project also from FlipMu, is progressing nicely. You can track its progress – and even try your hand at building it yourself – on the FlipMu site and blog (hosted by createdigitalmusic):

http://flipmu.noisepages.com/blog/
http://flipmu.noisepages.com/work/chronome/ [beta, but with loads of files for your use if you're brave]

Here are some of the projects Owen mentions:

The best resource I could find on the now-open-source Octinct project is on the monome forums:
Official Octinct Package Thread

It points at where to find the newly-released documentation, code, PCBs, and whatnot.

Also, there’s one further device that may be available commercially, though, for now, it remains mysterious. The Electrix Tweaker has specs similar to the OhmRGB, but we’re still waiting for it to ship, and have only the grainy image seen here.

So, there you have it – color is coming to grids in a big way. We’ll be watching the development of the OhmRGB, in particular, and it remains the full-color controller you can have right now. And we’ll watch these more experimental projects, too. It’s like a rainbow…

http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_ohmrgb.php

Chronome Prototype from FlipMu on Vimeo.

The monome is defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is: it’s monochromatic, it uses only on/off binary buttons, and that’s part of its beauty. But what if it weren’t that? What if a monome could do color, and velocity sensitivity? As both engineering problem and design inquiry, that question holds some intrigue.

Owen Vallis, who with Jordan Hochenbaum makes up the digital duo FlipMu, shares the Chronome prototype. Like the Arduinome before it, it re-conceives the monome’s brain around the open-source Arduino microcontroller platform – now in the form of the beefier MEGA. But moving beyond RGB lights, it adds pressure sensitivity via conductive fabric (an idea that could be extended elsewhere).

More on the Flipmu blog, which is hosted here on Noisepages:
http://flipmu.noisepages.com/blog/

And I love the idea of the conductive fabric, borrowed from the LUMI project:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~chanson9/LUMI/LUMI.html

More on this project to come, I hope.

The monome meme continues to spread virally through your music gear. With some custom code (made freely available) and a little assistance from the free Arduino platform, Philly-based hacker Wil Lindsay has converted the $50 Bliptronic 5000 device from ThinkGeek into a monome. That gives you full compatibility with the community-made patches that support the real thing, for a song.

If you’re handy with this sort of thing, you can follow the code and basic build instructions provided and mod your Bliptronic yourself. If not, you have two choices – the first half dozen early adopters can pay Wil to hack and test their Bliptronic for a fee to raise money for a PCB, and then once that happens, anyone who wants an all-in-one, more fully-documented kit will be able to choose that route instead.

Bliptronome V2 : tests, kits, and code released

Bliptronic 5000 @ ThinkGeek

It occurs to me that someone might be able to do something different with that source, as well.

The way I’d still recommend assembling a monome if you can’t get in on one of the official products or kits would be the Arduinome, which is best-documented at FlipMU’s Arduinome site. But I like that the Bliptronic is now an option, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if some monome owners pick one up for the heck of it. I’ll send an update if Wil is successful with that kit.

What happens when you put all the digital and electronic tools you love together into one groove session? I expect it probably looks something like this video. Welcome to the new digital music age: DIY electronics, vintage digital tech (Game Boys), and modern computer tech (Monome as Arduinome clone, Max/MSP, and shiny MacBook) all coexist. And a fair bit of what you see if a modern hybrid of old and new paradigms, like the thoroughly modernized Tracker Renoise. Thomas Margolf says “Greetings from Rotterdam” and writes,

We made a first Jam using the new GorF step-sequencer, Arduinome, max msp patch ‘Soyuz’, a Gameboy running LittleSoundDJ, LSDJMC2 Gameboy Midi-Interface, Renoise, Ableton Live and a Nord Micro-Modular. It’s the first session with a fresh soldered GorF.

Lovely stuff. Keep on soldering and jammin’, folks. Okay, tagging this story is going to take … a lot of tags.

Thursday night, Owen Vallis is the guest at the Ableton Live User Group Las Angeles, downtown at SAE. He’ll be talking multi-touch goodness, like the amazing Brick table he’s worked on with Jordan Hochenbaum, as well as the potential of the Arduino-Monome clone Arduinome project to which he’s contributing. I’ll be there. 8p, free; see the flyer.

There are also some non-public meetings going on while I’m there that should also bring good things your way, so stay tuned!

Let’s be clear about one thing: building your own Monome from a kit isn’t actually necessarily for everyone. DIY is a wonderful thing, but you want to make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew — always start simple and grow from there. You can buy a premade Monome, the sustainably-produced, open-source, boutique controller, and be much safer. That said, sometimes something wonderful happens along the way when a project evolves from what you thought it would be into something else — the occasional bloodied finger a necessary sacrifice.

Johan Larsby was inspired by the team behind the Arduinome clone. (I got to talk off the heads of Arduinome’s Jordan and Owen yesterday and get to stalk them in the LA area next week.) Somehow, in trying to create his own, something … else happened. And there was blood.

It was one of these I tried to build, but failed with as you will read further down, so instead I created something that suited my skills better and something I probably will use a lot more Thus I dubbed my contraption to Moanome.

You really have to see the thing in action — oversized with its giant arcade buttons, it’s got a quirky character quite different from the minimal original:

Johan Larsby has been seen round these parts before. He’s made wonderful plug-ins, tipped us off on early Wii-as-music experiments and bent toy guitars into instruments in our circuit-bending challenge. Check out his site for java demos, DIY projects, code and Buzz plug-ins and more.

If you start a project and it goes … somewhere else … don’t be afraid to share.

And as the monome originators note in the original post, this both inspires smiles and demonstrates “the rewards of open source.”

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

The “Arduinome” gifts the Monome with two new possibilities. First, it’s a breakthrough on the availability front: at a time when official Monome kits are backordered, it makes it easier to make your own Monome on a budget. Second, it makes hardware hacking on the Monome far easier, by allowing people to make microcontroller-level modifications on the relatively friendly Arduino platform. (The Arduino was designed not for electrical engineers, but for artists just dipping their toes into electronics, even for the first time.)

Now, if you went out and cloned, say, the latest Roland keyboard, they’d understandably take issue. But part of what tells you this is a different kind of product is that the Monome creators have actually taken an active interest in the Arduinome’s development. Support won’t go through the Monome team, and there are still plenty of reasons to buy the real thing, but true to those open principles, both projects stand to benefit.

I got the scoop on the details of this project, what it’s about, and the gory details of how caffeine can fuel a massive electronics project even with relative newcomers to the craft. Jordan Hochenbaum, a leader of the project, talks to CDM (with some additional comments by his partner in crime, Owen Vallis. (Jordan and Owen, students at CalArts, also won CDM’s Futuristic Design Challenge earlier this year — video of that coming soon, I swear!)

(Skip about two minutes into this video for some side-scrolling LED action.)

Arduinome Nerdscroll Demonstration from BricK Table on Vimeo.

Why clone the Monome? What’s special about this project?
The Monome represents not only a controller interface, but also a new way of thinking about interface design. The very heart of the Monome concept is its minimal, open-ended form. This ideology is reflected in Monome’s decision to make the firmware and software open-source. Coupling these ideas with the strong community development support in the Monome forum, it became clear that the Monome was the perfect interface to try and port to the Arduino microcontroller. What makes this project special is Monome’s willingness to make their controller open-source. No other manufacturer would dream of letting people see how their stuff works, or letting a bunch of curious individuals try to build a clone.

What’s the relationship of Arduinome to Monome? What’s unique about the Arduinome?
We love the Monome, and the concept behind it. While the original Monome is difficult to come by, the Arduinome project was really born out of a desire to learn about physical computing and to better understand interface design. With this knowledge, we hope to be able to better use our Monome clones and develop new ways to push the buttons – er, envelope! We hope to build off the Arduinome in the future and explore new ideas.

What was the response from Brian and Kelly [Brian Crabtree and Kelly Cain, creators of the Monome] to the project?
Brian and Kelly have really provided encouragement towards our project. Actually, Brian was surprised the code wasn’t ported a while ago, especially since they’ve licensed their work for non-commercial use. Brian actually seemed really thrilled to see a bunch of people collaborate, which we think is just great!

What’s done, and what remains to be done? Where do you need contributors?

Completed:

• Finished porting the 40h firmware serial protocol
• Added additional support in Arduinomserial in order to address Arduino serial stability issues.

Still needs work:

• Implementing ADC and Encoder support.
• Testing for additional bugs.
• Porting the 256 serial protocols.
• Adding RGB support

Background – and Behind the Scenes

“Arduinome” is a collaborative project that aims to create a clone of the popular and inspiring Monome USB controller using the Arduino platform. The idea was originally brought up in a “Music Tech Forum” at the California Institute of the Arts. With about two weeks left in the semester, and very little experience, Owen Vallis and I put together a group buy and decided to just go for it. Everyone absolutely loved the original Monome, and we all figured this project would be a great introduction to the crazy world of physical computing.

Owen had already purchased the original Monome button pads, however the rest of us went for the Sparkfun button parts due to their availability and cost. After putting together a parts list, we began researching the 40h protocol and what it would take to port the firmware to the Arduino. The Arduino needed additional multiplexors in order to work with the matrix (specifically the MAX7219 and the 74HC165n/164n); fortunately, we found an amazing Arduino shield already designed by Brad Hill (unsped). After contacting Brad, he was kind enough to share his design. He asked that, in keeping with Monome’s business ideologies, the PCBs be printed locally and environmentally friendly. We were more than happy to do so; Monome’s business ideologies are very admirable, to say the least.

As soon as the parts were in, you could almost always expect to see somebody in the tech shop at CalArts soldering up their LEDs or diodes, etc. It was really amazing. As the semester’s end came near, Owen and I took on the responsibility of finishing the firmware. We started meeting every day or so at Silverlake coffee, feverishly trying out other people’s methods and ideas. (Thanks, Melka, Octinct, and others.) We had come pretty close, but always ended up having difficulty getting the buttons to work properly. After another night of caffeine-fueled failed tries, we came back to my house and decided to work for just a few more hours. At about 2:30am, we still didn’t have it working. We looked at each other, realized we wanted to call it a night, but in the traditional fashion of how Owen and I work, said “f@#!” it! Lets open up the 40h source, and work on porting it over to Arduino, as best as we can.” We were able to keep some things from the code we were working on, and at about 6 a.m. we got it working! With the sun barely rising through the LA smog, we went to get even more coffee and celebrate over breakfast.

Later that day, I made a section on the BrickTable blog detailing a short parts list, a little information, and of course the firmware. We posted the firmware link on the Monome forums. Immediately, there was a ton of interest, and people either seemed to be already in the middle of their own projects, or eager to start a new one. The response was fantastic, and quickly began to reveal the bugs in our early work.

Through the Monome forum, we’ve met and worked with a lot of great people. One person in particular has really pushed the project to where it is today. After two revisions on our website, Ben Southall made some major improvements to the firmware (addressing the Arduino Ports directly), and began working on “ArduinomeSerial”. It’s a MonomeSerial hack, if you will, which is optimized for the Arduinome. Ben realized that the USB serial chip on the Arduino differed from the one on the Monome, requiring changes to the original MonomeSerial in order to keep the serial connection happy. After testing, testing, and more testing, and a premature release, we now have a SourceForge project up with both the firmware and ArduinomeSerial. Anyone interested in delving into the source code, we have an SVN repository for version control, so feel free to dig in!

Guessing the project makers are fans of this site! Thanks!

We are really happy with the speed, response, and stability of both the firmware and ArduinomeSerial. It uses a specifically named protocol “a40h-xxx” vs. “m40h-xxx” like the regular 40h Monomes. However, ArduinomeSerial should be able to work with both regular Monomes as well as Arduinomes – thanks, Ben! I have modified Melka’s instructions on flashing the FTDI serial name on the Arduino to have ArduinomeSerial properly recognize your clone. This is posted on the Brick/Arduinome website (http://bricktable.wordpress.com/), and the process shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.
The next steps, of course, are to continue improving speed and reliability, as well as implement the ADC support. After that, there is the possibility of looking into the 256 series protocols as well as RGB support; however, these are both going to require a large rewrite, as well as hardware changes.
Monome is truly an amazing community; I’ve seen it firsthand working on this project. When Owen and I first posted the firmware, people started suggesting ways to improve it. Ben Southall took it to the next level and made crucial changes and additions to the firmware, in addition to creating ArduinomeSerial. We really feel that this kind of collaboration is amazing, and one of the great results of Internet collaboration and making ideas open-source. We can’t thank the Monome community enough for making all this possible, and of course Brian Crabtree, Joe Lake, and the rest of the Monome collective for creating an amazing and inspiring canvas. If you build your own, please send in details, pictures, bug reports, and the like.I know Owen, Ben, and myself would all love to see your work or find out about kinks we need to work out. We have a forum on the SourceForge page as well as a thread on the Monome forum. We believe in the Monome and the community ethic around it, so don’t be strangers!

The Arduinome Site contains a parts list, instructions for building your own Arduinome, and other documentation. We’ll have more on this project very soon!