Hello folks! Am hoping someone will be able to help me out here. First
of all I should clarify that I am a relative noob to electronics, not
having done any since leaving school 10 years ago, however I find I can
usually pick things like this up fairly quickly.

I received the 40h kit the other day, along with some beautiful blue
leds and a couple of infrared sensors. I assembled the logic board but
it does not seem to be functioning correctly. It is recognised by my
computer (on XP) and I installed the FTDI driver, monome serial, the
max/msp runtime and have run the test-app (_40h_test.mxb). I can get
'noise' showing in the adc section at the bottom of the _40h_test.mxb
when I turn on the adcs/encs in monomeserial. I can also get an led to
light as is suggested in the assembly instructions, but the led does not
necessarily stay lit. In fact, when I attempt to 'light' all the cells
in the _40h_test.mxb, the cells in the top-left seem to randomly turn
themselves on and off. I have attached an image of this. It is the
leftmost 7 columns, and the upper 8 rows that display this behaviour. I
don't want to move onto constructing the keypad bit until I have got the
logic board functioning correctly so would be very appreciative if
someone could maybe suggest what I could try to fix this...?
My instincts are saying it is down to poor soldering and I have checked
and double checked, and resoldered where I have thought necessary, but
without any luck. Perhaps the particular rows/columns which are causing
the problem may be pointing to a particular set of connections which are
dodgy?

Hope I've made myself understandable, and many thanks in advance to
anyone who can help.

Cheers

AC

everything is fine.  move ahead to the next step. :)

the connections to the buttons are 'floating', meaning they're not at 
5V, they're not at gnd, they're not defined as anything, they're just 
pieces of copper floating in space.  there's pullup resistors on part of 
the circuit but apparently there's still room for floating.

Really? Ok will do! Me just being overly worried! Because this stuff is 
new to me I assume that I'm gonna duff it up somehow. But thankyou Tone 
for the advice and the superspeedy response (again!). Also, thanks for 
all your other advise here and on the AL forum - couldn't have done this 
without all of that : )

I had exactly the same problem. Once connected to the button board 
everything works great.

haven't had a chance to build the button board yet (this weekend 
hopefully), but that's good to know, thanks : )

I am not having a problem with my logic kit but I remember someone was 
with a loose USB connection or something. Someone recomended a little 
adapter(like an extension of the USB port Type-B male to Type-B female) 
to go in the base enclosure. I think that topic was removed. Anyone have 
that link? sorry to hi-jack this subject.
thanks
Cole