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What why?
 
 A while ago I found an interesting post on the arduino forums about
 a guy who made a 8x8 LED panel for his friend to use to visualise when
 playing music. So when I was browsing my local thrift-store
 I found an old slide viewer (for you kids, it's an old pre digital way 
 to take photo's).
 
 -Hell yeah I thought (but in Swedish) this would look sweet if I mounted
 a bunch of LED's in it. So i bought it for 15 SEK. (1.51 EUR or 1.9 USD)
 
 
Hardware.

 I have already made almost all of the arduino-code I needed on my 
 moanonme. Also the 8x8 LED matrix is no mystery to me. If you want to 
 recreate it it's dead easy. First you read the shiftout tutorial on 
 arduino.cc and make one of those a bit more permanent. After that you 
 make 7 more rows with led's and connect each row's gnd to a different
 pin on the Arduino. Then with a little bit of code magic you write to
 the shift register which led's that are on on a specific row. that row 
 being set to "read" in the software forcing that row to be the only one 
 that is lit. By doing this superfast you're eye wont notice the difference.
 
 This might sound easy, and it is, unless you do it on a small scale. The
 Lens on the slide viewer was only 3*4cm so I needed LED's that would fit. 
 I found  some green that fitted perfectly. I tried to glue them toghether 
 first but  in the end that was all a big heap of fail. easiest was to use 
 a perfboard and mount them on that. I used an iDuino board since these are 
 smaller and thus easier to mount inside the pretty cramped battery 
 compartment inside the box.
 
 
 
 Decimilia used for prototyping
 
 Backside of LED matrix 
 
 The 595 chip shiftout for the led's


  
 
Software

 There where a few features I wanted of the finished build. I wanted to 
 easily create sprites/images. And I wanted to be able to controll the 
 displaying of the images from within Ableton Live. Prefferably as a 
 MIDI device so I would not have to code yet another VST.
 
 So yep a very tiny little Arduino program which you can get here
 
 So I made a little processing sketch that let's you draw on your computer
 screen and both show it there and on the device. This was as really easy.
 Press 2 to paint, 3 to erase and 1 to print the image in data format so
 I can copy-paste it to a server program. I choose to print the data in a 
 human readable/modifiable code so I could change it without the program if
 I wanted to.
 
 Here it is if you want to play with it: opalpainter.pde (you'll need 
 processing)
 
 
 
 So to the serverside. Easypeasy aswell as always with processing, chose 
 another type of visualisation though. It all worked well until I tried 
 to get any of the MIDI processing solutions to work. fail fail fail.
 It works though, and here it is for your playing fun: opalserver.pde
 1 and 2 to flip between your images
 
 
 
 So in the end I reused stuff from the moanonme project. os x serialport and
 MIDI in from a totally own port. Most of this code is not written by me
 although I've seen that os x serialport stuff on more then five different
 places on the internet so I'm not really sure who's the original author.
 Anyways, this program listens to midi-in and tells the arduino to display
 graphics I hooked up to the current MIDI note. get it here
 
 
The video

 What would a build be without a video? nothing, since nobody reads these text's 
 of mine that's what!
 
 

 
 

Total Cost:

Arduino iDuino        17.82 USD
Diabildsvisare         1.91 USD
LED's                  4.57 USD
some wire and solder   1    USD
-------------------------------
Total                 25.3 

just below 200 SEK, NICE!



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