Turn Anything Into a Touchpad With MaKey MaKey

Listen, we all know that you’ve been wanting to turn your salami and provolone sandwich into your laptop’s trackpad, and we’re also fully aware of your secret desire to turn those double cherry gummy candies into your new PS3 controller. We’re not (entirely) here to judge your (weirdo) desires, but there’s a Kickstarter project that can make all your (awful) touchpad desires come true. It’s called MaKey MaKey, is somewhat difficult to type due to the camel caps, and is actually pretty awesome.

MaKey MaKey is a do-it-yourself kit that allows you to easily turn objects into touchpads that have no right being touchpads. The kit hooks into the Internet, then hooks into whatever items you can creatively attach to the little prongs. The project page shows everything from Play-Doh stuck to paper controlling video games, to individual bananas being substituted for keys on a piano. Probably the coolest, the video shows MaKey MaKey attaching to pencil drawings of a gamepad and then being used to play Pac-Man.

Anything that conducts a tiny amount of electricity can be connected to MaKey MaKey and made into some kind of input, and will work with Windows XP, Vista, 7, and OS X.

The project will run until June 12, and is asking for a meager goal of $25,000. It’s currently sitting at a little over $8,000, so it has a way to go. Help out with a little pledge, and you can finally turn your cooked udon noodles into a replacement Shift key.

(via Hacker News)

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