the cheapest monome of the world

It has been a long time I wanted to built monomes for my instruments.

I never did it because illuminated button are definitly too expensive.

After a few thinging and one or two trials, i found this solution.

A superposition of differents laser cutted layers.

from the bottom to the top:

the Circuit holder, not very interesting...

Here you have, two layers. Led holder and led cases.

A plexiglas sheet. here, it is a opalescente one. A translucite or transparente one is better, because leds will be multiplexed, as result they don't produce light enough to have a readable monome.

That you can aslo see here, is the tricky part of the building: put wires and keep them under tension.  A easier way to do it is to use multi-wire cables and to put them under tension when you put all the parts together.

A felt layer to keep distance between vertical and horisontal wires. And the same happy wiring to do here.

The frame, to set it some where with additionnal things... of course.

I forget tin pvc sheet. Rodoid must be ok too. I don't think you can cut it with lazer cutter, but the good old razor blade is great for that.

Final result...

To drive the whole leds, a great tuto here:

http://www.instructables.com/id/810-LED-Matrix-with-4017/#step1

But there is many ways to do that.

for the buttons:

Personnally, I use the same technique. Decade counter+shiftregister(using CD4021 instead of 74HC595)

But this should work too:

http://www.spikenzielabs.com/SpikenzieLabs/Project_64.html

Enjoy!

And the machine I mad it for. "Pouèt!", a car horn sequencer.