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Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Do it with Makey Makey
MaKey MaKey is an open source hardware project that can be used to turn everyday objects into touchpads. It is a kit that consists of a MaKey MaKey board, Alligator Clips and USB Cable. It can be used with any object that can conduct a bit of electricity. How does it work? Here is an excerpt (from official website) explaining how this kit works :
Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple.
When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and web-pages, because all programs and web-pages take keyboard and mouse input.
Makey Makey VideosHere is a video that demonstrate the use of Makey Makey :
Who are the guys behind this project?
There are two guys, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum who are final year PHD students at MIT media lab.
Here is an excerpt from their Bio :
Eric holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and a Master's degree in Technology in Education from Harvard University. He also holds a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab, for which he developed Jots, a system to support reflective learning in the Scratch programming environment.
Jay studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech where he was named Engineer of the Year. He was awarded a Gates Scholarship to earn a master's in Internet Technology from Cambridge University. He also holds a master's in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab where he invented "Camera for the Invisible." Ac cording to Jay and Eric :
We developed the circuit while students at MIT Media Lab while advised by Mitch Resnick, the creator of the Scratch programming language. MIT Media Lab taught us how to design stuff the way ninjas do.
To bring the circuit to the market, we are collaborating with the amazing team at Sparkfun. Sparkfun is the perfect choice for us. They are located in the USA (in Boulder, CO), and they treat their employees fantastically. Sparkfun is the world's largest manufacturer of Open Source Hardware, which is critical to MaKey MaKey, an all Open Source Hardware project. We worked closely with Jim Lindblom and others from the Sparkfun team to get the board ready for manufacturing. We're grateful to have them as our partners in this project. Check out their products on their website.
Lastly, the amazing team at Kickstarter helped us rally the funding for this project off the ground. The original funding for this project was all grass roots, with more than 11,000 backers averaging $50 each. Our main contact was Aurora, and she helped us every step of the way. We highly recommend Kickstarter as a way to launch your creative project. If you visit the kickstarter page for this project, you will see that the project has already raised it's funding goal of $25000 on June 12, 2012. Here are the statistics provided on the projects kickstarter page :
11,124
Backers
$568,106
pledged of $25,000 goal
0
seconds to go
Some Important Links
Note : The credits for the video and picture goes to the author. The Intention is to just share the information here.
Tags:
object
open
internet
touchpad
makey
hardware
computer
source
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