diii

Brian (@tehn) at monome reached out about commissioning an adaptation of web-druid that would work with monome’s new iii framework. I was super excited to get to work on something official for monome, considering I had been a fan of their work for many many years. Working with Brian on this was an absolute pleasure- and the result has been pretty well received, with new iii scripts being released regularly and no issues on the web-diii github since launch.

For those who are into instrument design, iii really is special and I strongly encourage you to give iii script development a try. Imagine basically being able to develop your own custom midi control gestures on hardware that supports it, then being able to plug that custom controller into any MIDI host and interact with that instrument using your custom interface. I have had a huge amount of fun with my grid plugged directly into my Workshop System doing this, or even just plugged into my laptop with some of the built-in synthesizers included with Ableton Live.

diii is similar to web-druid in that it communicates via utf-8 encoded string literals containing lua that the iii firmwares understand, but diii is different in that it also allows interaction with the littlefs filesystem that exists on iii devices. So you can upload new scripts or presets, download scripts that are stored on the device, and more.