Description
Description
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 Classic by JoyLabz 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 an input. For example, play Mario with a Play-Doh keyboard or piano with fruit!
The Makey Makey Classic 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 Makey Makey can also act like a keyboard or mouse. There are six inputs on the front of the board, which can be attached to 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.
Hardware Overview
Top Side
The Makey Makey is a two-sided circuit board. On the more simple top side, the Makey Makey has six inputs: the up/down/left/right arrow keys, as well as the space bar and mouse left click:
Each of those inputs as well as the very important “Earth bar” are available in the form of what call “alligator-bait” connectors. You'll use the included alligator clip cables to clip right into the hole pairs.
If any key is activated with the "Earth Bar," an associated LED will light up next to the pad.
Back Side
When you flip the board over to the back side, you will notice a mini-B USB connector and POWER LED. The connector is where you will connect the USB cable to a computer. The LED will light up when the board is powered. You've also got access to 12 more keys via the black female headers:
- W, A, S, D, F, and G on the keyboard side
- up/down/left/right mouse movement and left/right clicks on the mouse side
The bottom header has six additional ground (aka Earth) outputs. And the top header is an expansion/output header. They KEY OUT and MS OUT are connected to the LEDs on the back to indicate whether you're pressing a keyboard or mouse key, respectively. This can be used to connect low-power LEDs and small motors. The RESET will reset the board when connected to ground. There are also pins for power through the 5V and GND. The last two pins (PGD and PGC) are used by the factory to program.
The pins broken out through the black female headers are all available in the form of “jumper-wire” connectors to connect male jumper wires, header pins, stripped wires, or tinned tipped wires.
Documents
List
- 1x Makey Makey HID Board
- 1x Mini-USB Cable
- 1x Alligator Clip Pack
- 1x Jumper Wire Pack
