SparkFun Makey Makey Deluxe Kit

You may be the greatest living banana pianist, but how will you ever know if you don't make yourself a banana piano? Good news, that project and countless others are easier than you think with MaKey MaKey.

Using the MaKey MaKey, you can make anything into a key just by connecting a few alligator clips. The MaKey MaKey is an invention kit that tricks your computer into thinking that almost anything is a keyboard. This allows you to hook up all kinds of fun things as input. For example, play Mario with a Play-Doh keyboard or piano with fruit!

The MaKey MaKey uses high resistance switching to detect when you've made a connection even through materials that aren't very conductive, like leaves, pasta, or people. This technique attracts noise on the input, so a moving window averager is used to lowpass the noise. The on-board ATMega32u4 communicates with your computer using the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol, which means that it can act like a keyboard or mouse.

There are six inputs on the front of the board, which can be attached via alligator clipping, soldering to the pads, or any other method you can think of. There are another 12 inputs on the back, six for keyboard keys and six for mouse motion, which you can access with jumpers via the female headers. If you wish to use a different set of keys or otherwise change the behavior of your MaKey MaKey, you can simply reprogram it using the Arduino environment. The MaKey MaKey is an Arduino-compatible controller that runs the Leonardo bootloader, so reprogramming is fast and easy.

Now included with the MaKey MaKey is a USB cable, a pack of jumper wires, and a pack of alligator clips!

The Deluxe Kit includes everything that the basic kit does, plus another pack of alligator clips and a roll of copper tape so you can really go crazy!.