MaKey MaKey: Control your mouse+keyboard with ANYTHING4

Ok, so this Kickstarter ends in five hours and most people will have to wait an unknown amount of time to get their hands on a unit after today. But the video should still be available in the future, to blow the minds of future generations.

Here is what you’ll witness in their pitch video: a Pac-man controller built out of pencil lead on a piece of paper, DDR played using buckets of water, piano playing with bananas, typing with alphaghetti…

This Kickstarter is sort of a sweet spot makes it worth posting for me, because the price is really reasonable and the results are unarguably impressive. It brings to mind the Kickstarter for Twine, except that the minimum price isn't one hundred dollars. Granted, Twine seems awesome, except that it costs more to get anything useful done with it, and what it can do won’t blow anyone’s mind. This is Arduino with all the parts included - plug-and-play electronics hacking. That makes me really excited, because I’ve got lots of stuff I’d like to make, but I don’t yet have the skills.

For example: Sacha Chua, who first came on my radar as someone who blogs about Emacs, blogged late last year about a homemade USB foot pedal. Combined with AutoHotKey, that provides for a lot of possibilities - you could do pretty much anything with a tap of your foot. Thing is, I don’t know how I would get started building such a thing.

MaKey MaKey would let me build a foot pedal out of anything I have lying around the house. With more potential buttons, because my understanding is that you can use a configuration file to change what keys it will send. That’s awesome, and you will never convince me otherwise.