Building the Bliptronome v0.1 and 0.2

So here is the followup to my last Bliptronome post. As I said I bought a bliptronic-5000 from thinkgeek over christmas break and was working on it back at home. I didn’t have very much for spare parts or tools, so I had to make due with that I had.

Here is the box it comes in. Try to contain your excitement.

Here is my first prototype. I learned a lot with this, not the least being that using old ide cables can be a very frustrating way to prototype. After re-wiring the arduino 3 or 4 times I finally tested the cable only to find that 5 of the pins were all grounded internally (somehow). I ended up with the breadboard here and it worked out for a test.

Since the ide cable failed I ended up taking the female header off of the scrap board and mounting some solid core wire to it.

This is the top of the the button board.


This is the male header on the underside of the button board.

After the prototype worked I decided to make a more durable version with an arduino shield. Here I have the pins soldered on and I’m about to start mounting resistors.

I chose a right angle header for the cable, as anything else would definitely make it too tall for the case. I messed this up though, as I should have run the connections and then soldered in the header. I had to make a lot of awkward connections because the header obscures the bottom of the solder holes.

I also had to cut short the icp headers to make way for the ribbon cable. No loss, as I have no need for that anyways. They are intact in this shot, but they are the 2 rows of 3 pins in the middle of the two boards.

Here you can see one half of the pulldown resistors in. People get confused by the orientation of these. A wire comes from the pin of the arduino and then connects to two wires, one is a resistor that goes to ground, and the other goes to the header. Think of it as a 3 way intersection. Also just to confuse people further, the wiring isn’t finished here. It still needs a wire to connect each resistor to an arduino pin.

Here is a shot of the pcb, just for kicks.

And this shows the final assembled shield. I may try to squeeze it into the case, but I’m also thinking of having a pcb made, so I might leave it external for now.

here is a closeup of the top of the shield. Not too pretty, but it works.

Here is the bottom.

And here is an action shot, showing it running nerdscroll sitting on my macbook pro.

Next step, sourcing and mounting some pots. Here are some knobs I picked up. The pcb seems to encroach on the pot hole, and the holes seem slightly small for most pots, so it might be a tricky fit unless I modify the case.

Still a little bit lost? Or wondering what one can do with the hardware? I’ll do a brief introduction to the world of monome in my next post.