The Bullduino’s are starting to arrive. When [Arclight] received his in the mail the first thing he did was to share the hardware details. Of course this is the hardware that participants in the Red Bull Creation contest will be receiving ahead of this year’s contest.

The board is an ATmega328 Arduino clone. Instead of an FTDI chip for USB this one is sporting an ATmega8u2. That’s not too much of a surprise as it should translate to a cost savings. [Arclight] reports that the stock firmware flashes a message in Morse code. It seems the Hartford HackerSpace got their Bullduino several days ago and already decoded the message. It reads:

“Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?”

The guys that did the decoding speculate that this could be a type as ‘l’ and ‘y’ are inversions of each other in Morse code; or it could be some kind of clue. At any rate, if you want to do some disassembly and see if there’s anything lurking in the firmware, [Arclight] posted FLASH and EEPROM dumps from both ATmega chips along with his article.

The litany of exciting Maker Faire products continues with MaKey MaKey, a device that turns anything capable of conducting electricity into a controller. Developed by MIT Media Lab students Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, you simply run a bulldog clip from the board to an object and hold a connecting wire in your hand. Connecting over USB, it's entirely programming-free, but if you find your interest piqued, you can flip the board over to use the Arduino module baked into the hardware. It's already surpassed its original $25,000 Kickstarter goal and when the run begins, you'll be able to pick up everything you need for just $35 -- but if you can't wait that long, head on down to the Bay Area this weekend.

[Thanks, Ryan]

Continue reading MaKey, MaKey turns the whole world into a keyboard

MaKey, MaKey turns the whole world into a keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 01:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.