A question to the monome folks.. can you tell us what it's like to build 
hardware from scratch? whats the hardest thing?

Keith Lang wrote:
> A question to the monome folks.. can you tell us what it's like to build 
> hardware from scratch? whats the hardest thing?

one step at a time really. we posted a walkthrough of our process at:

http://monome.org/index.php?m=process

which is more about the assembly/sourcing than the design stage. 
prototyping is the fun part. the hardest part was definitely the 
silicone button pads, which we made from the ground up. jason did a 
great job on this.

any specifics you had in mind, in terms of relating a sort of 
experience?

brian crabtree wrote:

> any specifics you had in mind, in terms of relating a sort of 
> experience?


nice simple forums software btw.


Yeah, my question is... why is most music hardware so conservative and 
crap? people could be building any shape at all.. and they still make 
things that comes from the 1950s

you made the silicon pads from the ground up? do you mean you made some 
kind of piezo thing?

> Yeah, my question is... why is most music hardware so conservative and 
> crap? people could be building any shape at all.. and they still make 
> things that comes from the 1950s
> 
> you made the silicon pads from the ground up? do you mean you made some 
> kind of piezo thing?


there is actually lots of non-conservative music hardware, it's just not 
produced on a large scale. manufacturing is expensive, would be the 
easiest answer to why it's not mass-produced. making a mold costs a lot 
of money, to get a weird shape either mold injected or compression 
molded.

our button pads are compression molded, meaning there's a big aluminum 
tool we had to invest in. i should get pictures of this from jay, it's 
amazing. we also have a tool for the little conductive pills (black 
loops). we also have a huge mold for the bottom enclosure, which we were 
initially pouring with resin in house, it was a nightmare, and now it's 
machine-compressed with black high duro silicone (and feels amazing).

was the decision to not add velocity sensitivity due to technical 
challenges, or finding that it wasnt useful?

Keith Lang wrote:
> was the decision to not add velocity sensitivity due to technical 
> challenges, or finding that it wasnt useful?

we agree it's useful. and no, not a technical challenge.

i'm an ultra-minimalist, and there's an incredible draw for me towards 
simplified systems. when you introduce limitations it promotes more 
intuitive design. we wanted to keep a binary correlation. on/off 
buttons, on/off leds.

this is also why we didn't do tri-colored leds. if we had tri-colored 
leds and velocity sensitive pads, it'd be a entirely different 
instrument. it'd still be interesting, but just different.

but i am honestly less interested in gradients (tri-color or velocity) 
than i am in the 16x16. more bits!

remember, hacking this thing is encouraged. we already know someone 
working on the tri-color hack. can't wait to see it.

> but i am honestly less interested in gradients (tri-color or velocity) 
> than i am in the 16x16. more bits!

some thoughts on giant grids,

minimalism can turn into confusion without context ;) laser etching 
marks for each block would be nice. i could go for little pluses .5 on 
each axis. i was also contemplating milling little divots into mine.

a slight gap between blocks could also work, but makes certain 
visualizations harder.