Makey Makey: An Invention Kit for Everyone is an invention kit designed to connect everyday objects to computer keys. [1] Using a circuit board, alligator clips, and a USB cable, the toy uses closed loop electrical signals to send the computer either a keyboard stroke or mouse click signal. This function allows the Makey Makey to work with any computer program or webpage that accepts keyboard or mouse click.
MIT students, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, the Makey Makey was produced by research done at MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten. [2] Prior to creating the Makey Makey, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum also worked on creative tools and invention kits such as Drawdio, [3] Singing Fingers, [4] and Scratch. [5]
The first prototype for Makey Makey was created in 2010 and tested at a workshop at San Francisco Exploratorium where participants used the product to create a game called "Drum Pants" that used a beach ball as a controller and water buckets as the foot-pads to play the console game, Dance Dance Revolution. [6] The Second Prototype was created in 2011 and 2012 and tested with interactive design specialists, after which the final prototype was tested at the Maker Faire in San Francisco in 2012 before the end of the Kickstarter campaign. [7]
Makey Makey was started through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $50,000. Following its initial funding on Kickstarter, Makey Makey was written about in Mashable, [8] Wired, and New Scientist, [9] among others.
The Makey Makey board [10] was originally designed around the Atmel 32U4 microcontroller. [11] The controller uses all 12 analog input pins on the 32U4 microcontroller in combination with a pull-up resistor array to sense the low voltages returning from conducting materials like fruit or skin. This microcontroller can easily be used as a USB-HID device and act as a keyboard, gamepad or mouse. The hardware design is very similar to the Arduino Leonardo, [12] with some added pull-up resistors and indication LED's. Because of the similarities you can easily turn a regular Arduino Leonardo into a Makey Makey compatible device. [13] You can also program the official Makey Makey using the Arduino IDE. [14] The REV 1.2 board [15] is built around the Microchip PIC 18F25K50. [16] With the REV 1.2 reprogramming the microcontroller is no longer possible, [17] and the functionality is now limited to keyboard and mouse emulation. REV 1.2 also drops the open source nature of the board design, and the new Makey Makey boards no longer can run stand-alone code. The newest 2017 version seems to be designed [18] around a GPCE4096UA sound controller. [19]
AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel, acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016. These are modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers. AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.
Atmel Corporation was a creator and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or application-specific standard product (ASSPs) depending on the requirements of its customers.
PICAXE is a microcontroller system based on a range of Microchip PIC microcontrollers. PICAXE devices are Microchip PIC devices with pre-programmed firmware that enables bootloading of code directly from a PC, simplifying hobbyist embedded development. PICAXE devices have been produced by Revolution Education (Rev-Ed) since 1999.
Atmel ARM-based processors are microcontrollers and microprocessors integrated circuits, by Microchip Technology, that are based on various 32-bit ARM processor cores, with in-house designed peripherals and tool support.
Minimig is an open source re-implementation of an Amiga 500 using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
Arduino is an Italian open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, while the software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL), permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors.
Microsoft Corporation has been selling branded hardware since 1980, and developing devices in-house since 1982, when the Microsoft Hardware division was formed to design a computer mouse for use with Microsoft Word for DOS. Since then, Microsoft has developed computer hardware, gaming hardware and mobile hardware. It also produced drivers and other software for integrating the hardware with Microsoft Windows.
Each time Intel launched a new microprocessor, they simultaneously provided a system development kit (SDK) allowing engineers, university students, and others to familiarise themselves with the new processor's concepts and features. The SDK single-board computers allowed the user to enter object code from a keyboard or upload it through a communication port, and then test run the code. The SDK boards provided a system monitor ROM to operate the keyboard and other interfaces. Kits varied in their specific features but generally offered optional memory and interface configurations, a serial terminal link, audio cassette storage, and EPROM program memory. Intel's Intellec development system could download code to the SDK boards.
A single-board microcontroller is a microcontroller built onto a single printed circuit board. This board provides all of the circuitry necessary for a useful control task: a microprocessor, I/O circuits, a clock generator, RAM, stored program memory and any necessary support ICs. The intention is that the board is immediately useful to an application developer, without requiring them to spend time and effort to develop controller hardware.
The Bus Pirate is a universal bus interface device designed for programming, debugging, and analyzing microcontrollers and other ICs. It was developed as an open-source hardware and software project.
Wiring is an open-source electronics prototyping platform composed of a programming language, an integrated development environment (IDE), and a single-board microcontroller. It was developed starting in 2003 by Hernando Barragán.
Maximite Microcomputer is a Microchip PIC32 microcontroller-based microcomputer. This series of chips uses the MIPS 32-bit RISC MIPS architecture and was neither an ARM nor PIC variant. Originally designed as a hobby kit, the Maximite was introduced in a three-part article in Silicon Chip magazine in autumn of 2011 by Australian designer Geoff Graham. The project consists of two main components — a main circuit board and the MMBasic Interpreter, styled after GW-BASIC.
Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source rapid-prototyping standard for building small electronic devices using the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio/Visual C# Express.
Circuit Scribe is a ball-point pen containing silver conductive ink one can use to draw circuits instantly on flexible substrates like paper. Circuit Scribe made its way onto Kickstarter on November 19, 2013, with its goal of raising $85,000 for the manufacturing of the first batch of pens. By December 31, 2013, Circuit Scribe was able to raise a total of $674,425 with 12,277 'backers' or donors.
The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller (MCU) and developed by Arduino.cc and initially released in 2010. The microcontroller board is equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards (shields) and other circuits. The board has 14 digital I/O pins, 6 analog I/O pins, and is programmable with the Arduino IDE, via a type B USB cable. It can be powered by a USB cable or a barrel connector that accepts voltages between 7 and 20 volts, such as a rectangular 9-volt battery. It has the same microcontroller as the Arduino Nano board, and the same headers as the Leonardo board. The hardware reference design is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and is available on the Arduino website. Layout and production files for some versions of the hardware are also available.
Jay Saul Silver is an electrical engineer and toy inventor from Cocoa Beach, Florida. Silver is the Founder and CEO of JoyLabz and MaKey MaKey and was the first-ever Maker Research Scientist at Intel.
The Arduino Nano is an open-source breadboard-friendly microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller (MCU) and developed by Arduino.cc and initially released in 2008. It offers the same connectivity and specs of the Arduino Uno board in a smaller form factor.
The Proteus Design Suite is a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation. The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and technicians to create schematics and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards.
Hernando Barragán is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist, designer, and academic known for creating the Wiring development platform as his 2003 Master’s thesis project at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy. The Arduino project is based on Wiring. He is currently an educator at the University of the Andes.
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