Build your own Makey Makey

The Makey Makey is a great board to quickly build interface devices. It plugs into a computer and gets recognized as a keyboard and mouse and allows you to easily add buttons and switches to your setup. As it works on conductivity you can change all kinds of objects (such as bananas) into buttons.

However, the Makey Makey is quite expensive, can't be easily modified and isn't always as easily available. Luckily you can build a very similar input device using a pico. After following the steps below the boards will get recognized as a HID (keyboard, mouse, gamepad) by any computer and OS (Mac/Win/Linux).

This process consists of the following steps:

• Installing CircuitPython and copying the Human Interface Device (HID) libraries to the board.
• Changing the code to select the inputs you want to use. You have the following options:
  • Keyboard - any key on a physical keyboard, or combination of keys (ctrl-c and ctrl-v)
  • Mouse - buttons, scroll and mouse movement
  • Media buttons - play, pause, skip, sound level

 

 

Adafruit Circuitpython library bundle: https://circuitpython.org/libraries

Adafruit HID library documentation: https://docs.circuitpython.org/projects/hid/en/latest/