Jay Silver from SparkFun and Eric Rosenbaum from MIT kickstarted a very nice project, which lets you to convert almost everything into an input-device for your computer.

According to SparkFun:

MaKey MaKey allows you to turn almost any common object into an input-device for your computer. The front side of the MaKey MaKey board has six inputs: up/down/left/right arrow keys, spacebar and a mouse left-click. Using alligator clips you can hook those inputs up to anything that’s even slightly conductive – fruit, play-dough, water, pencil drawings, whatever you can dream up – which becomes a keyboard or mouse input to your computer. So you can play a banana piano, play-dough Mario, or even create custom webcam triggers.

As for the technical side, MaKey MaKey is based on Arduino Leonardo’s bootloader and on ATMega 32u4. From its kickstarter page:

It uses the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol to communicate with your computer, and it can send keypresses, mouse clicks, and mouse movements. For sensing closed switches on the digital input pins, we use high resistance switching to make it so you can close a switch even through materials like your skin, leaves, and play-doh.

A longer introduction to MaKey MaKey can be found on SparkFun, while a more comprehensive description can be found here, together with some funny videos about its use.

[Via: Sparkfun and Kickstarter]

Noah Hornberger, former Pixar artist, have recently invented a motion-activated musical toy called the Dub Cadet.

The precise rotation and speed of the Dub Cadet determines what pitches play from this MIDI and Arduino-based electronic instrument. It can produce over 3 million possible rhythm possibilities for any one bar of music. By offering intuitive controls, the user can generate an endless variety of musical patterns for hours of creative brainstorming, music education, and fun.

 

The project is rising funds on Kickstarter, to turn the working prototype into a final product set to be shipped in October 2012.

Via:[Mad Science]

The musical interfaces can sometimes be extremely curious. That’s the case of  the chess sequencer.

The Chess Sequencer is a step matrix sequencer made from a chess board, where placing the pieces make music. The sequencer is connected to software synths on my Mac trough USB and a Processing patch to convert the serial data to internal midi.

The core here is an Arduino Mega. I was planing to use the Duemilanove but laziness caught me. The Mega has tons of IOs so I do not have to make a lot of multiplexing saving me hours of work.

Check here the full instructions to build your own!

Right, back again with an update on my idea for a kick-ass fanctroller.

So far, I've been coding away and right now, I'm up to the point where the actual fan control is implemented (I've already written the LCD-commands, several input functions, a setup and a menu.) But I'm having some problems.

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I started designing this controller in December 2011. After 4 months and 2 previous revisions it will finally be shipping out April 2012. I think this is DAGU's best Arduino compatible robot controller yet!

Designed for small robots using small batteries, the Micro Magician is a 3.3V controller running at 8MHz.
Working from 3.6V to 9V means this constroller can run from a single LiPo cell or 3x NiMh batteries.
Reverse polarity protection means no blue smoke if you get your power wires crossed (reverse polarity diode rated at 3A).

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