The monome meme continues to spread virally through your music gear. With some custom code (made freely available) and a little assistance from the free Arduino platform, Philly-based hacker Wil Lindsay has converted the $50 Bliptronic 5000 device from ThinkGeek into a monome. That gives you full compatibility with the community-made patches that support the real thing, for a song.
If you’re handy with this sort of thing, you can follow the code and basic build instructions provided and mod your Bliptronic yourself. If not, you have two choices – the first half dozen early adopters can pay Wil to hack and test their Bliptronic for a fee to raise money for a PCB, and then once that happens, anyone who wants an all-in-one, more fully-documented kit will be able to choose that route instead.
Bliptronome V2 : tests, kits, and code released
It occurs to me that someone might be able to do something different with that source, as well.
The way I’d still recommend assembling a monome if you can’t get in on one of the official products or kits would be the Arduinome, which is best-documented at FlipMU’s Arduinome site. But I like that the Bliptronic is now an option, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if some monome owners pick one up for the heck of it. I’ll send an update if Wil is successful with that kit.