MLR inspired looper.

I’ve never owned a Monome, but always loved them. They look beautiful, the apps are inspiring, and let’s face it, they revolutionised midi controllers. There’d be no Launch Pad if it weren’t for the Monome Grid. One of the very early apps on the Grid, was MLR, designed by Brian Crabtree, the creator of Monome.

I wanted to try and create something similar to this, albeit a crude and inferior version. I’ve designed an add-on board for my Cutlassiezer PCB, as used on the Glitch Delay. This is based around a PIC chip which communicates to the main Teensy based board via I2C.

In this video, the Kalimba is being amplified by the Microphonie, and then into my KhronoKrusher delay module, then into the looper.

On the main board you can see prototyped on vero-board, the PIC uses a shift register to shift a single ‘ON’ bit through the register. At each bit location, the ON bit can optionally turn on the LED and read the value of the associated switch. This technique was borrowed from the Le Strum by sixty four pixels. The Teensy sends the desired LED states across the I2C bus, and the PIC chip sends back the current state of the switches. Here’s the schematic from Eagle (click to view an enlarged, readable version).

This is just a work in progress at the moment. I’ll give further updates as I progress. As always, the code is available on GitHub here.