PCB

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Banana spacebar? Alphabet soup keyboard? Super Mario Brothers Play-Doh controller?

No, we haven’t lost our minds (yet). Welcome to the quirky, marvelous, inventible world of MaKey MaKey, where with just alligator clips, USB connector, and a circuit board, you can turn anything—no, seriously, anything—into a controller or keyboard.

If you are the unimaginative type, you might not be immediately impressed. So here’s some videos for uninteresting people like you to get you inspired and overcome your life-long ailment of being a boring person. Then you can be awesome like the team members behind MaKey Makey, who generously agreed to sponsor the first fabrication workshop at Fab Lab El Paso!

Stay tuned for more information on the date, time, and reservation process for the event.

For electronic music fans and/or vegetable+fruit lovers out there, watch this.

In the meantime, feel free to dream up new, creative, and wholly unnecessary ways to make controls, keys, and buttons for the purpose of making pew-pew sounds, playing a musical masterpiece, breaking the high score on a favorite game, or whatever else you can think of.

Have fun and don’t forget to share your ideas with us!

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We found a great Wiki page that holds your hand in a step by step, Dummy’s Guide style manual to milling your own PCBs. The maker who wrote up the Wiki lists the software and hardware used, all of which can be commonly acquired for free or at relative low cost. Those tools are Eagle CAD, pcb-gcode, pcb-probe, Mach 3 CNC, Zen Toolworks 30deg V Shaped Engraving Bit, random surplus carbide PCB drill bits and Guido for doing the milling.

Of course, the same can be accomplished using the Shapeoko, as you can see in this process video by Wilhelm Duembeg using a V-shape bit. The design and print process remains more or less the same regardless of the precision mill you choose to use.

The biggest plus in trying this out is that you won’t have to wait for days or even weeks for the board to ship from a custom PCB service business. So if you are looking for that quick turnaround for a project or if you are just really impatient, this is the way to go!

Stay in Control with MaKey MaKey Inventor Kit

Design and Mill Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs)