Makey Makey - making everyday "things" fun! Here is our quick review - while Makey Makey has been around for a while, there is no end to the creative projects that we're seeing within the maker community. We have all flavors of kits ready to ship here in Australia.

Transcript

 Hey guys, Sam here from Core Electronics and today we’re going to be taking a look at the Makey Makey Board.  Now this is a fantastic product designed for educators, students, DIY enthusiasts aimed at connecting everything around you  to your computer or another USB device. So we’ve got a few Makey Makey Kits, there’s the Starter Kit, our Standard Kit, our Classroom Kit, all with a few different features in there, check out our other tutorials on those. But for now we’re going to be taking a look at the Standard Makey Makey Kit. If we have a look inside we’ve got jumper wires with alligator clips, very handy for connecting up to pads, i’ll put those to the side. We’ve got our USB cable so this is just from our USB mini to a standard USB. We’ve got a couple of standard space 0.1 inch jumper wires and they are male to male so they are great for plugging in to the Makey Makey going from a breadboard so you can use an external circuit or a project that you are working on.  Of course we have the Makey Makey board, so let’s open this up, now this board is fantastic and the idea is that there is a small microprocessor on board an ATmega32U4 to be precise and it’s based around the Arduino platform so it’s the same chip line that Arduino use so it’s very compatible and you can reprogram it as well which is fantastic. If you have a look here you’ll notice, I’ll turn it on to the other side, and here’s these pads that have arrow keys, you’ve got the space, the click functionality in them, little LEDs for indicators as well and your earth pads down here.  This means we can take some of these alligator clips and connect them up. Now how the Makey Makey works is really simple, all you need to do is make a circuit with one of these function pads to the earth and it will trigger so you can connect it up to your computer and if you use the space bar and you trigger that it will act just as if you were pressing the space bar on your computer so its pretty cool,

So lets take a look, now it’s plug and play! The very definition of the word, so we can plug it in right now and it will work without any software, any drivers, any kind of set up. So I’ll go ahead and plug this is to our computer, alright, so we’ve got that nice power LED turning on there and I’ll flip this over so you can see what pads I’m using. So I’m going to be using the space bar for now and of course we need a wire for the ground because we need to be able to make a circuit. Now, if you can have a look when I touch these two together that LED is going to light up letting us know that we have made a connection and of course on the computer here it’s acting like the space bar which is pretty cool but a little bit boring, I agree. So I’ve bought along some friends today - some fruit!  So the great thing about the Makey Makey is you can connect up external things, fruit, anything that is conductive really. So you could use a pencil, you could draw your circuit on paper, connect it up that way, use your  human body so I could make a bridge from here, my fingers touching and it is going to set that off as well.  So i’m just going to go ahead and use the up and down arrows this time because I’ve only got two oranges - so I’ll plug those in to our oranges and I’m just going to stab them in any which way.  Alright, now we’ve got our extremely complex circuit set up and now if I hold this and touch one of these and green is down, it’s going to trigger the down arrow. I can do that just as well - pretty cool so that is what the Makey Makey is designed to do, its a creative tool. It allows you to make circuits and objects and triggers out of whatever you want and connect it up to your computer. If you want to play PacMan and make your own game control for that you can do that, if you want to create a creative keyboard using bananas or infamous banana piano you can also do that.  You are not just limited to what is on the top here, if we turn it over you can see that there are these headers along here. So we’ve got different functions, we’ve got some extra earth pins which is your ground along with analogue inputs. Now they can be reprogrammed as analogue inputs or as default, they are actually mouse functions - so side to side, up and down, left and right click. You’ve got WASDFG there. You’ve got outputs there as well so these outputs will trigger when an input triggers and you can reprogram them using the Arduino IDE to do what ever you want.

That’s a quick run down on the Makey Makey, there’s a lot you can do with it and it’s really limited by your creativity and what you want to do with it.  We’re going to take a look at some of the different features that you can do with it including reprogramming and how you can use it in classrooms, we’re going to take a look at that in some of our other tutorials so check out that section and stay tuned for more awesome videos on the Makey Makey, see you guys :-) 

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