Drawdio - Sketching with Hardware (a pencil with a circuit attached)

December 29, 2008

What happens when you turn a regular object into a Cyborgian one? I ordered a Drawdio kit to find out. Two nights ago, I got this sweet Drawdio kit in the mail. I put down everything else I was doing and built it from scratch with a few of my friends. Before we knew it, were were drawing sound! The video tells more of the story.

Drawdio - Sketching with Hardware (A pencil with a circuit attached to a Pencil from Amber Case on Vimeo

Drawdio is the perfect Saturday project for a budding/novice electronics enthusiast. The kit is pathetically simple to construct, and only takes about 30 minutes once one gathers all of the supplies.

The Drawdio was developed by Jay Silver of MIT's Media Lab.

“One day I bought a “harmonium” kit at the street market in Bangalore“, says Silver. “I hacksawed the keyboard off to make the first ever Drawdio circuit. We played with it at a local school in the slums using plants, water, our foreheads, etc. My friend told me graphite would work too.

Meditating on it, I realized the Drawdio circuit should be literally attached to a pencil to “draw audio,” and that’s where the name came from: Draw + Audio”.

See http://www.ladyada.net/make/drawdio/ for a full set of instructions.