Making a Pizza Box MIDI Controller with Conductive Paint
Paint a fun and funky MIDI input device for making music on a pizza box.
Paint a fun and funky MIDI input device for making music on a pizza box.
When I was a kid, I remember drawing lines on paper and saying they were the schematics for a robot. Of course I had no real concept of circuitry or electronics at that age, but it was cool to think I did. Now what if I’d given some Bare Conductive Paint (now available in the Maker Shed) to 6 year old me?
There are so many cool projects out there that use conductive ink, but where to get the ink? Now you can DIY that part, too!
At World Maker Faire, I finally got to see paintable circuits in action. Matt Johnson spoke with me about the conductive paint that people were using and showed me a few projects that demonstrate the possibilities. The business cards they brought were printed with a swath of conductive paint suitable for some home experimenting.
Bare Conductive grew out of the founders’ graduate studies at the Innovation Design Engineering Course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The version of their conductive paints they had at Maker Faire is similar to the skin paint featured in a music video of a few years back.
The paints can be used to create traditional circuits, and for signalling with the Arduino. Since the company has just passed its’ regulatory approvals, we can expect to see many new experiments as the community of users grows.