Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard! – Video on TED.com.

Why can’t two slices of pizza be used as a slide clicker? Why shouldn’t you make music with ketchup? In this charming talk, inventor Jay Silver talks about the urge to play with the world around you. He shares some of his messiest inventions, and demos MaKey MaKey, a kit for hacking everyday objects.

Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum’s MaKey MaKey kit lets you turn everyday objects into computer interfaces — inspiring both fun and practical new inventions.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

While we wait for the Center Stage video archives to go up, here’s a little treat from the ImageThink “graphic facilitation” team who were creating simul-illustrato-casts of the Maker Faire Center Stage talks on poster board: Jay Silver’s “The World Is a Construction Kit” Talk.

Here’s the talk description:

Here’s a secret, the real construction kit doesn’t come in a box. The real construction kit is the world all around you (and even your own self). Are bananas piano keys? Is a water faucet a theremin? What can we learn from Andy Goldsworthy when he uses icicles like Legos? I’m doing research with MIT, JoyLabz, and Intel to try to find out how people can see the world as changeable, and see themselves as the changers.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Collin McRae created a video showing how to use a MaKey MaKey as a looper — when all of your limbs are occupied with your instrument!

See more work from Collin-McRae.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

A really handy technique! Pie Plate Drum Sequencer with MaKey MaKey:

We took a metal pie late and connected it to MaKey MaKey so that when you touch it, it triggers a hi-hat sound. Then we added masking tape, so that as you slide your finger around it, it plays a rhythm. We also added some copper tape on top of the masking tape, to trigger a bass drum and a clap sound.

Collaborative construction and performance by Bret Victor

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Jay Silver: How to control a computer with a banana @ CNN.com.

This childlike sense of play, curiosity and discovery — one that many people lose as they move through adulthood — has informed Silver’s life and work ever since. It’s no accident that he shows audiences video clips of wide-eyed toddlers encountering snow for the first time or an M&M candy skittering around on a moving escalator. Or that he took the stage at PopTech in a T-shirt, baggy shorts and a surfer cap, looking more like a skateboarder than someone with a Ph.D. from MIT.

Pong too boring for you? That’s because you aren’t playing “Banana Pong!” Take a look at this game of “Milwaukee Makerspace Banana Pong” controlled by real bananas via a MaKey-MaKey, created by Pete Prodoehl from the Milwaukee Makerspace.

I found a nice one-player Pong sketch written in Processing, but it was your typical vertical paddle movement, and I needed a horizontal paddle movement. I ended up rewriting the game a bit to turn it all 90 degrees so the left/right of the banana controller would make more sense.

Once I got the game working, I needed to add some fitting graphics, so what better than a take on the Milwaukee Makerspace logo with… bananas. (We’ve got a history of weird/wacky logos.)

One thing I learned was that bananas are not very tough! If you let people pound on your bananas for a while they get really mushy. I should have brought a lot more spares so I could swap them out more often.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here are photographs from a MaKey-MaKey workshop for adults in Space Studios in London — as this “invention kit” continues to reach wider and wider audiences:

MaKey MaKey is a kit that lets you turn anything into a controller. No technical expertise is needed, letting your imagination run wild while you quickly prototype ideas and interactions.

What will you do and learn?

You will work in groups to design and implement an interactive art installation using found objects and a MaKey MaKey.

What do you need to already know?

No previous knowledge is needed. A huge imagination and tendency to play around with different objects is highly encouraged.

What do you need to bring?

Though not necessary, you are welcome to bring your own computer.

What will be available during the workshop?

You are welcome to bring your own computer or can use one of the iMacs available in the SPACE Media Lab. We will provide MaKey MaKey kits and a selection of objects to be used in your project.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

This has to be one of my favorite MaKey-MaKey music demos so far! From j.viewz, via DangerousMinds.net

“Making a Salad v 2.0″

j.viewz on iTunes on Facebook.

Shot By Roy Rochlin

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Fun MaKey-MaKey demo from Medialab Amsterdam:

Playing trackmania nations, a car simulator, with a Steering Wheel made with a bottle and some alumin paper and using the feets as pedals. Made with the MakeyMakey widget for the “Building Interfaces” workshop.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Check out this MaKey-MaKey science fair project from Maddi H:

This is my 7th grade science fair project. I used a raspberry pi, a makey makey, and many items to test and see if they are electrically conductive or not.
Enjoy!

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Need a case for your MaKey-MaKey? Check out this line of MaKey-MaKey cases that Michiel Bieshaar shared with us from his online store MyMatics:

Did you manage to get your hands on a Makey Makey but you are missing out on a good case / enclosure for it? Now you can order a nice case for your MaKey MaKey and enjoy it even more… Currently we are selling a case for the MaKey MaKey in transparent color and a case made out of wood.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Anybody else always dream of setting up an interactive music-making dance floor? (Or a DDR-paneled house? Just me?) Well, Matt Roberts pulled it off and party-tested it — here he shares how he setup his foil patches to control it using a MaKey-MaKey:

I made an interactive dance floor in my basement for a house party.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here a young maker uses his MaKey-MaKey to create a bow controller for Minecraft — touching on so many beloved activities in one smooth motion!

From The Maker Mom:

My son rigged up Makey Makey with a bow to add a more realistic shooting action to Minecraft.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a helpful tutorial to show you have to setup a project in Scratch on a Raspberry Pi, controlled by a MaKey-MaKey. From Terence Eden:

Using a MakeyMakey, I’ve created a fruit and vegetable interface to my Raspberry Pi with the help of Scratch.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a great write up by Pete Prodoehl of a Milwaukee Makerspace project that fellow member “jason” created that he extended and shared on his site RasterWeb:

A few months ago a bunch of us from Milwaukee Makerspace took part in Bay View Gallery Night, and jason set up the “Fruit Synthesizer” which was a Makey Makey with a variety of fruit, and some software combo of Max MSP and GarageBand. People really enjoyed it, and with the most recent Art Jamboree happening with jason out of town, I figured I would pick up the slack.

With a simple base made with two pieces of wood, some dollar store forks, a few nuts, bolts, and bits of wire, we had the Makey Makey Apple Piano.

One of the issues with jason’s Fruit Synthesizer was that you had to touch the fruit. He did provide hand sanitizer, but with it being flu season, have dozens of people touch a piece of fruit seemed like a bad idea, and forks just seemed like the right thing to keep hands clean, and work like xylophone mallets….

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a fun first MaKey-MaKey wind chime project from Jasper Fields:

This project used a Makey Makey, Soundplant to assign the nature sound files, aluminum, and conductive thread.  Lots of fun for a first project with the Makey Makey.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a great chance to check in with MAKE’s staff and community on topics in their most recent issue, featuring Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace’s Getting Started with Raspberry Pi book as well as the MaKey-MaKey and the Power Racing Series.

From Maker Media:

Join the editors of MAKE for a live and online conversation on Google+ today about our just-released new issue–Volume 33. The theme of the magazine is “software for makers” so we’ll be checking in with the founders of Makey Makey about their “banana piano” project featured in the magazine. Getting Started with Raspberry Pi authors Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace will be on hand to talk about their must-have book for Rasp Pi enthusiasts, also featured in the the magazine. And there’s more. We’ll be hanging out with Patrick Callahan from the Power Racing Series, a Maker Faire favorite that adorns the cover of the issue. And MAKE technical editor Sean Ragan will be in the house to talk about his CNC joinery project detailed in the magazine.

This will be a jam-packed half hour so be sure to tune in right here at 2pm PST and 5pm EST. If you’ve got questions for any of the participants be sure to post them in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them.

The issue is available on newsstands now, via subscription, or in the Maker Shed.

Read more.

A great quick MaKey-MaKey MIDI tutorial from Pixel 3D:

Today we going to show you how to turn the makey makey into a midi controller.

The makey makey comes with a simple drum app but its not midi and doesn’t showcase it’s response or latency. So here’s a quick and easy way to use virtual midi to map keyboard characters into midi notes.

To set this up on the makey makey, you can wire up the keys in the back to any type of conductive material as triggers. So in this setup, I have them wired up to aluminum foil and a banana.

On your computer, you can download a free copy of vmpk that will allow you to map your keyboard characters into midi notes. When you have the makey makey hooked up to your computer, you can map the characters by going to the edit menu, and adjusting the keyboard map settings. You can also download my preset map to get you started.

So here’s a quick demo to showcase low latency and fast response time.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Ah, finally a bobble heads MaKey-MaKey instrument! Not only did they beat me to the punch, they have a great bobble head set!

From Genuine Interactive: Genuine Labs:

Ever wish you could take play to another level? Thanks to the inventors of MaKey-MaKey, an ingeniously simplistic plug-and-play device that turns any object, animate or inanimate, into a playable “key,” this is now possible. Watch as Genuine Labs explore new methods of user interaction by turning our favorite Star Wars characters into a basic keyboard using this cool little gadget. Learn more about Genuine Labs and other experiential projects here.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a giant interactive MaKey-MaKey model snapped by MAKE’s Dale Dougherty:

Open Make today at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. Large-scale Makey Makey interactive interface.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

MaKey-MaKey folded into the Night Zookeeper project:

On Monday we were lucky enough to visit Oaklands Primary School in South London to run the Night Zookeeper project. We had visited the school last year and so were keen to keep the experience fresh and exciting for the children. Therefore we planned an extension to this project which was a little different to our previous visit…

The day had a very special twist, as we introduced our newly acquired MaKey MaKey http://www.makeymakey.com/ for the first time. This product allows you to use everyday objects such as: bananas, sunglasses, water and even human bodies as an alternative keyboard and it works with all computer programmes. We created a Night Zookeeper board game and enabled children to link their physical creations seamlessly with the digital world. 

The children began the day by creating their very own Night Zoo animals. They then transferred these animals onto a special board game piece. The children designed the enclosures for their animals and pieced them all together to create a large zoo map. They even had a go at making models of the Night Zookeeper himself. (My arms are obviously a lot longer through children’s eyes!) Each child then uploaded information about their animal, including an image which they had created using our new (not yet available) mobile drawing app. We then introduced the children to the MaKey MaKey and they began to explore its capabilities…

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

From Dave Razor:

A small project using Makey Makey in conjunction with Abelton Live, Resolume 4 and a video projector to turn a knife, spoon, fork and a beer into audio-visual triggers. Go sports!

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a great round-up of interesting Edu-Tech Startups from this year — including … Joylabz / MaKey-MaKey! I wasn’t familiar with several of these, so I really appreciated her list.

From Audrey Watters, Hackeducation.com:

It probably goes without saying, but I’ll type it out anyway: 2012 was an incredible year for education technology startups. Launches. Updates. Funding. Acquisitions. Adoption. Headlines. Disruptions. Drama. Politics. Buzz. Hype. Revolutions. And stuff.

…It’s my blog. My rules. My rubric — as much as there’s a rubric here. This isn’t some scientifically constructed list of the startups with the most registered users or most revenue or biggest Series A round or most popular iPad app or most Techcrunch headlines. I chose each of these for lots of different reasons (reasons I explain as I highlight them in turn): great technology, great product, great vision, great founders…

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

From @habber:

Baked potato banana drum machine. #makeymakey klasien @anamm http://instagr.am/p/TtyEfmgaP1/ 

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Via @ericrosenbizzle.

xmas music in spain played on fish, champagne, crab, shrimp, grapes, gifts, etc. with #MaKeyMaKey

And from the YouTube video description:

Cada año vuelven los tópicos navideños: los típicos adornos, el gordo de la lotería, el de Navidad… La típica familia feliz, los petardos, los langostinos, el turrón, las uvas, el cava… Y el concierto de año nuevo, tan típico. ¿Y si a todo esto le metiéramos un poco de tecnología y creatividad digital? ¿Y si lo típico fuera reinventar los tópicos cada año? Suena bien, ¿verdad?

[ED NOTE: And here's quick Google Translate version, obviously very rough...rather than revise the resulting prose it I'll leave it that way: better than my nearly nonexistent Spanish.]

Every year Christmas become topics: the typical ornaments, the lottery jackpot, the Christmas … The typical happy family, firecrackers, shrimp, nougat, grapes, champagne … And New Year’s concert, so typical. What if all this we Shove a bit of creativity and digital technology? What if he was reinventing typical topics each year? Sounds good, right?

Feliz 2013

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

From @grantpotter:

Gabriel has spent all morning designing a fully functional custom Minecraft controller with his #makeymakey

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

From @elizabethhberg.

Playing Pacman with tin can controllers #makeymakey #tincan #pacman #bored #invention

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

From @ModReplica:

Kids playing potato drums with #maKeymaKey homg! We have ample cowbell.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

If you haven’t seen these darling little “invention kits” before, the abbreviated description would be that it is a device that turns the objects in your environment into a controller much like a keyboard. In fact, like a keyboard, the device sends simple keypresses to your computer so you can use the MaKey-MaKey to trigger almost anything that you can assign a quick key or macro to, or use an application that remaps your MaKey-MaKey (or your keyboard) to perform even more functions!

The kit is ready to go out of the box requiring nothing beyond a computer with a USB port. But it is the process of exploring the lightly conductive properties of objects in your environment and dreaming up mischievous purposes for the keypresses that makes this kit so much fun.

Before you do anything, spend some time scrolling through our #makeymakeymonday series for a few ideas. We’ve done our best to collect all of the most interesting uses of the MaKey-MaKey that we could find, sharing them each Monday to inspire those approaching this fun inventors kit for the first time. Check out the list below for some suggestions culled from the series for things you might want to grab to do more with your MaKey-MaKey!

Available At Adafruit!

MaKey MaKey by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum – Made by JoyLabz: Here’s where you start! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between. MaKey MaKey was invented by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum & Made by JoyLabz. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video. (read more)

Copper Foil Tape wth Conductive Adhesive – 25mm x 15 meter roll: Here’s a handy way to create a pad to “EARTH” on a table or other surface for operating your MaKey-MaKey! Plus, copper tape can be an interesting addition to your toolbox. The tape itself is made of thin pure copper so its extremely flexible and can take on nearly any shape. You can easily solder to it, and the tape itself can carry current just like a wire. On the back is an electrically conductive adhesive. The adhesive can’t carry significant current but it is very handy for sensing applications where you don’t want to solder the copper tape. (read more)

Conductive Fiber – Stainless Steel 20um – 10 grams: This solid stainless-steel conductive fiber is super interesting! It’s great for felting and could also be spun into yarn if that’s your thing. We tested many different fiber thicknesses for needle felting and found that this one (20um fiber thickness, 316L steel, straight fiber) is the most pleasurable to work with. Use about 0.2g of the stuff to make a felt touch button suitable for use with the MaKey MaKey or capacitive touch sensing circuit. Make felt controllers or felt buttons onto an existing wool sweater! (read more)

Pocket Autoranging Digital Multimeter: The pull ups on the MaKey-MaKey can trigger a key press even with a pretty high resistance, but that doesn’t mean you can trigger with a piece of brick (that isn’t wrapped in foil). The best way to test which fruit, vegetables, tin cups, cymbals, metal shelves etc have a low enough resistance for triggering is to have a multimeter in your pocket! When we’re on the go, we like to keep a multimeter in our purse and this model is by far the best pocket meter we’ve found. It’s so good you’ll end up using it as your main multimeter! First up, this meter can measure nearly everything: it’s got DC and AC voltage, resistance, diode, and beeping continuity test, capacitance, frequency, and current (both AC and DC in micro-Ampere and milli-Amp ranges.) There’s also an alkaline battery test – essentially a fixed range voltage test with a bigger drain to get a realistic load reading not just a floating voltage reading. And that’s not all! It’s also auto-ranging, has a data-hold button and turns itself off automatically after about 15 minutes to preserve the battery life. There’s a removable fuse inside for the current sensing side – cheaper meters have the fuse soldered in. (read more)

Premium Male/Male Jumper Wires – 40 x 12″ (300mm): For those looking to flip their MaKey-MaKey over to take advantage of the headers on the other side, grabbing a nice set of jumper wires is a quick and easy way to go from your MaKey-MaKey to a breadboard — or right to a custom connection you are making to a conductive substance. Use a little female socket and some copper tape to make a quick patching point on your MaKey-MaKey components. (read more)

Available Elsewhere!

Fruit, Vegetables, Legumes, Mushrooms, etc: Head to the grocery store, my friend, with your multimeter in tow! Making a banana piano is one of the iconic “first projects” usually attempted by MaKey-MaKey first time users. If anyone gives you a hard time — bring a Geiger counter and let them know you are the citizen inspector, there to inspect. (Or maybe don’t do this — what would you do with all of that radiation data you would collect? European readers will have less to worry about, I suspect.)

Play-Doh: Another MaKey-MaKey classic — Play-Doh game controller buttons and “squish circuits.” From the MaKey-MaKey How-To: “Play-Doh, Model Magic and other clays work very well as long as they stay moist.”

Glockenspiel / Xylophone kits: There are a number of kids toys and DIY carpentry kits out there to help you build simple mallet-based musical instruments. Well, when you can find uncoated/painted plates you have a great conductive surface to wire up for your MaKey-MaKey!

Junk Store Magic: Do you know what you get when you walk into one of those junk/antique stores with a multimeter and a couple of bucks in your pocket? Something strange and potentially inspiring that is also conductive in just the way you need it. Gifting a MaKey-MaKey and a strange tin toy might be the difference between a kid using a MaKey-MaKey solely to play Canabalt and coming up with a unique interactive invention.

Mod Podge: Mod Podge is the most popular brand a type of “modge podge” non-toxic glue+sealer+glossy finish substance used by millions of children and crafters to shellac various bits of stamps, paper, etc onto wood, clay ornaments, etc.. While I have been focusing on conductive treats for your MaKey-MaKey fun, it is actually going to be the use of substances like Mod Podge to seal over (comfortably for your hands and for your brain as it harmlessly air dries) the parts that you want to NOT conduct. Inventive uses this plus Play-Doh or other wet malleable clay substances — and the use of ground graphite to turn some of the clay into a very conductive (for MaKey-MaKey) traces — is an excellent way to make a squish-circuit that is easier for younger kids to operate without bridging across all of your hard routing work.

Plaster of Paris and paper mâché: There are hundreds of air-setting clays and powders that you can consider for bulking out the volume of a MaKey-MaKey invention — but plaster of paris and paper-mâché are classics that tend to be easy to work with. Unlike with the Play-Doh and other “wet”/moist clays that you might want to use to conduct electricity, you can use these substances to build the parts that do not conduct. Make sure to leave time for these to dry thoroughly — and consider sealing them over if you are going to apply moist clays to the surface (or these substances will wick all of the moisture out of what you need kept wet).

PlastiDip: This stuff is pretty amazing, though do not let kids loose with the stuff as it tends to stick around for a few decades. This is a great choice if you are looking to insulate part of a metal rod or plate for easier handling — or to take a wild and wooly experimental project and clean it up to be nice and compact, with all of the conductive bits nicely separated from each other. Also a great way to turn parts of a rough wooden box into a gentle container for a fragile project.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Last week I shared a few photos I found on Twitter from Josh Burker (@joshburker) featuring a variant on the game of Operation he and students were creating in #scratch with the help of a #makeymakey —
here are kids playing the final game!

Students testing their skills on the #MaKeyMaKey #Scratch Operation game.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Cool custom game controller project from Nadine Lessio:

During Novemeber I had the chance to participate in No-Jam, a 2 weekend game incubator put on by Dames Making Games. If you are in Toronto, and interested in game making, you should check them out.

I ended up making a game about squids, mainly about pooping squids. Yes, I made a game with a poop mechanic. Basically, you’re a squid, and to stay alive you need to eat. But the more you eat, the more waste you leave behind, the sicker your eco-system becomes. So you have to balance eating and cleaning up after yourself. You also need to deal with some invasive squid species who just mess everything up.

I also decided to make a custom controller for this. Since the movement mechanic is a mimic of Asteroids, I figured a tilt / squeeze controller would be pretty fun.

I chose a MaKey-MaKey for my interface board. I have an Arduino, but in this case, I didn’t really need a lot of sensitivity in the controls, and the MaKey-MaKey is a good item for get up n’go prototyping.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

From Superdefault, Via Eric Rosenbaum:

Play a snow-sports video game with a controller made of… actual snow!

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!u

Kenneth Auchenberg, ‏@auchenberg, shared a quick MaKey-MaKey drinking game interface that he build for Chrome (only) that is fiendishly easy to implement.

Visit it here! (Chrome only!)

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Prototype #MakeyMaKey Operation game using #Scratch for audio & visual signal that you are hurting the patient

Chopsticks wrapped with a coil of telephone wire and covered in copper tape for #makeymakey #Scratch Operation game.

#Scratch Cat outlined on #MaKeyMaKey #Scratch Operation game board

False bottom installed for #MaKeyMaKey #Scratch Operation game board

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Now here’s one way to thoroughly beta test a new game — play using fruit and a MaKey-MaKey — from the Bubble Bobble Lost Cave project:

Intevitable! the game is undergoing several last minute changes. We estimate that, in last weeks, we changed roughly 1/4 of the level content, scrapping several uninteresting levels and rebalancing the whole experience (Super mode too – but you need to find the new Super code to play it, you know).

This kind of fine tuning has being possible only thanks to our fellow beta testers. They are playing the game with various setups, emulators, operating systems and peripherals. The more crazy control system must be the one you see in the above video, set up by our good friend Fabio “Kenobit Bortolotti”. He just got his MaKey-MaKey kit [the wonderful gimmick which transforms nearly anything into a controller] delivered, and he thought that collecting fruit bonuses with a real fruit controller could have been fun.  It may sound crazy, well, it IS crazy, but Kenobit states it’s also pretty responsive, even if we suspect that the more intense moments, such as the final boss fight, may really  jam your desk:

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Another part of your life that shall be governed by a MaKey-MaKey: cocktails! Shared by J. Nathan Matias:

@Chetbox has developed a predictive model for the contents of cocktail database and fed that into SwiftKey, using it to suggest the next drink to pour. Then, using #MaKey MaKey, the software detects which drinks you have poured into your cocktail and suggests additional ones to mix in.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Another very cute MaKey-MaKey project shared by @kellysnook:

Sofia (10 years old) makes conductive astronaut Barbie that can type her name as she moonwalks. make @ home

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Check out this cool MaKey-MaKey PicoBoard Scratch Trumpet from Josh Burker:

I have been working on programming an electronic trumpet in Scratch. I am using a MaKey MaKey and a PicoBoard for the hardware side of this project. Here is the Scratch code I devised. You can download the project from my Scratch projects page. 

Scratch reads the PicoBoard’s sound sensor to determine if I am blowing on the microphone. For some notes, which use all open valves on the trumpet, I have added a fourth key that the MaKey MaKey reads. Additionally, the PicoBoard reads how hard I am blowing on the microphone, so Scratch will play a low B flat, an F, or a high B flat.

Read more.

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Via @WarehouseShower:

Is someone in the warehouse bathroom? @ZaiDivecha and @ckwilcox built a machine that tweets the status of the upstairs shower. We’re using the #makeymakey kit to make this happen

Here are a few of the status tweets:

‏

@WarehouseShower: OCCUPIED: Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but the bathroom’s busy / so chill out, maybe?

@WarehouseShower: VACANT: Go time.

@WarehouseShower: {‘VACANT’: ‘So fresh and so clean.’}

@WarehouseShower: You’re up.

@WarehouseShower: Take Simi for a walk, and by the time you get back, it’ll be your turn.

@WarehouseShower: I’ve got 99 problems but a busy bathroom ain’t one.

@WarehouseShower: The bathroom has been un-occupied.

Read more.

Is that your place setting, or are you about make music? Via @daverazor:

Say hello to my new musical instruments. Video to come soon #makeymakey #beer @ The Thunder Dome

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Very cute! Via @MissRushworth:

The winner in the year 7 #makeymakey design lesson, a DJ set for playing the drums!

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Via @joshburker:

#MaKeyMaKey drum pads for Kindergarten students to play color patterns they create. #Scratch

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Via @HarleyEdTech:

3rd grade experiments w/different teamwork techniques to play Frogger using a #MakeyMakey. The key: “Don’t go solo!”

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here’s a MaKey-MaKey project built around a wind chimes type instrument — run through Max6 to trigger chime-like tones and punch up the dynamics a bit. (via the makeymakey fourms)

I built a set of wind chimes using my Makey Makey (arrived yesterday!). I used Max/MSP to convert the keyboard inputs to MIDI notes and used a simple synth to produce chime tones. I wrapped some cutlery in foil to make it more conductive; forks as key inputs, knives as the ground.

Electric Wind Chimes using Makey Makey (Arduino) and Max 6. Hopefully this will be the first of many inventions

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

One rainy day, these folks noticed a secondary use for their wet socks. (via the makeymakey forums)

Our first makeymakey experiment
A simple piano made of wet socks..
just to avoid bananas

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Here was a pumpkin+Ableton MaKey-MaKey drum set back from Halloween, via the makeymakey forums:

Happy Halloween! Thought you might like to see what turned out to be the highlight of our party last Saturday: a pumpkin drumkit connected to Ableton Live, including a lemon/lime octave shifter. Already thinking about how to top this next year.

Thanks Makey Makey! Well worth the investment.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Take a look at these two videos of Kelly Snook playing a MaKey-MaKey flower piano that she put together — with the ground connection run to the umbrella she is holding. I added her birthday message to her sister below as a second performance with this rig. (via the makeymakey forums)

if any of you are in London, you might know that it’s rained continuously here for, like…months. so i made a musical instruments out of flowers and an umbrella and used it to play (a bad version of) singin’ in the rain. <3

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Jason Wild used a MaKey-MaKey and arcade buttons for quickly prototyping an Ableton Live controller he is working on.

I know it’s kind of backwards to hook it up to real buttons, but I love the way these arcade buttons feel.
This was just a quick test to get some ideas on how to make a full controller for Ableton. I’ll be working on more complex versions of this to come. I’d like to know what you think.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!

A MaKey-MaKey “prepared piano” works as an excellent piano phrase looper, from Kelly Snook:

This is a modification of my grand piano so that it can be easily looped. Using one maKey maKey, one channel of microphone input (Neumann TLM 103), a laptop running one audio channel into Ableton live, and the output via laptop headphone out to a vibroy vibration speaker stuck directly onto the piano soundboard, the artist never has to touch a computer or midi controller.

The maKey maKey sees a touch anywhere along the copper touch strip (below the keyboard) as a click on the multipurpose looper button, allowing the artist to start, play, overdub, stop, and/or clear the loops without ever taking hands away from the keys. the maKey maKey circuit is completed by a bare left foot on a copper plate on the floor. up to 12 additional functions inside ableton can be can be mapped to other copper plates on top of the piano, if desired. Improvisational looping is demonstrated here by Caeli Lohr.

The way I connected it is simple. the copper strip that runs below the keys is connected via the red alligator clip to computer key via the maKey maKey. that key is then mapped to the “all purpose” button on ableton live’s looper. no special plugins. the all purpose button is customizable in live – you can choose how you want the copper strip to control loop record, start stop, etc. viberoy transduces the audio out from ableton directly to the piano soundboard.

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Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!