Fun with Drawdio!

Ever since I first saw the Drawdio, I have been itching to buy one and put it in some sort of wearable project. It is a nice little synthesizer that has a lot of potential. I absolutely love the ‘OK2Touch‘ jacket that Drawdio creator Jay Silver made – it is such a fun interaction!

 

This week I purchased the Drawdio Fun Pack from Adafruit to play with and spent Saturday night stitching it into a quick prototype. I brought it to today’s NH Media Makers meet-up and it was a big hit!

Originally it was going to be a strange hat, but I couldn’t get a good connection with my conductive fabric to my forehead, so it morphed into a little hand puppet. I soldered some snaps onto the Drawdio board’s contacts so I could detach it from the fabric jellyfish/squid creature. Inspired by the ‘Unruly,’ a project from Makezine that uses resistors and pennies to make a little keyboard, I used conductive fabric patches and resistors to make musical tentacles. They also snap on/off for easy prototyping and I’m going to add different resistor values to make a variety of pitches/scales. Here’s a quick video, it still needs a few finishing touches, but it is fun to play around with so far.

There are lots of things I’d like to try with this method, and hopefully I’ll have some time in the future to refine the design and make an Instructable out of it. There are a few more pics of the building process over at my flickr account.