A tiny scriptable sound computer hides in plain sight on your Raspberry Pi, waiting to become whatever instrument you can imagine. The norns shield by Monome is a minimal, open-source DIY circuit board that turns a standard Raspberry Pi into a full norns, opening the same deep ecosystem of community-built instruments, effects, loopers, and generative tools.
Designed as a “hat” for Raspberry Pi boards, norns shield adds high-quality stereo line-level 3.5 mm input and output via a CS4270/CS4271 codec, a crisp NHD 2.7" OLED display, and three pushbuttons paired with three rotary encoders for immediate, performance-ready control. Audio, script behavior, and on-screen feedback all run through the norns software stack, giving you access to sample-based, granular, FM, subtractive, physical modeling, and more, all defined in SuperCollider and Lua.
Because the hardware and software are fully open source, you can build it yourself, customize the enclosure, expand storage via microSD, and integrate over USB with MIDI controllers, monome Grid and Arc, OSC networks, and USB–CV interfaces for modular rigs. The result is not a single synth, but a flexible, networked instrument platform that grows as the norns community invents new scripts and sound worlds to drop straight onto your shield.
