MaKey MaKey let’s you to play Mario with a banana

Two MIT students, Eric Rosenbaum and Jay Silver, have submitted their first project to the crowd-funding site, Kickstarter. Their promise is to produce the ultimate DIY starter kit. The MaKey MaKey is a simple control board that requires no soldering, no programming, and no breadboarding.

It’s a printed circuit board that hooks up via a USB connection to your computer, any object that can conduct a small amount of electricity (i.e. a person, potato, banana), and you. There’s a wide selection of input options including an old-school D-pad, Space bar, mouse buttons, and keyboard values you can assign to various objects, simply by hooking the board up via alligator clips. Think of it like an electrical circuit: when you touch the object you complete that circuit. For the expert-class inventors, the MaKey MaKey runs on top of Arduino Leonardo bootloader with an ATMega32u4 microcontroller. It utilizes a Human Interface Device (HID) protocol to communicate with your computer.

What you can do with the MaKey MaKey is up to you; the internet is your oyster. Download a game of Pac-Man, or get creative and find something a little more off the beaten path — Rosenbaum and Silver hooked the MaKey MaKey up to a beach ball to use with physics game a la Jelly Car. If this board is everything they say it is, you’re only limitations are what programs are available on the internet and, depending on the complexity of the project, how code-savvy you are.

Hardly out of the gate and this Kickstarter is almost near its goal. With 28 days to go and only a little over $8,000 away from their $25,000 goal, it’s safe to speculate that this project will be a success. More importantly, the reason this Kickstarter was created for manufacturing costs, which will bring the retail cost down significantly compared to what you might pay if this entire project was independent.

With the Kickstarter money Rosenbaum and Silver speculate they can sell an entire kit (board, USB cable, and alligator clips) for around $35, which is the least expensive donation option (if you want to get a MaKey MaKey).

via Kickstarter

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