thinking out loud

So I'm thinking about the monome kit a lot since it just became available for pre-order. Both the logic board and the buttons are a great thing to be able to get for diy projects of all types, especially those involving microcontrollers and music and robots and stuff. Anyways, I was thinking about the challenge of making a faceplate. I looked today at sites about pouring resin into molds, laser-cutting plexiglass to order, and thought of other interesting approaches including simply hand-sawing it slowly out of wood or plexi with a small coping saw.

Meanwhile, I received a number of samples a few weeks back from a company that makes those blister buttons for xerox machines and they also sent me a couple of touch-strips. I was thinking about making a row of vertical touchstrips to act as faders in a monome-like instrument, and the samples they sent were basically translucent stickers with adhesive backs, but touch-sensistive. I assume they change resistance as you move your finger up and down. Since the strips are translucent, you could put a row of colored leds behind them to act as indicators. So the "xenome" could be used in conjunction with your monome to give you fader-like control of 8 channels, as well as animated output of sound levels, or whatever... cause it's all programmable.



So I figure if I'm going to all the trouble to order or build a custom faceplate for a monome 40h kit, why not do something special? I'm imagining one faceplate that could accomodate a monome kit and a xenome kit into one unit. (An additional feature of the xenome kit could be a built-in MIDI converterfor those who are not ready to OSC).

More Thinking
And thinking
sketches 1
sketches 2
ribbon tests
shebang