Hasta La Gadget!

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

It’s okay. It’s not just you. You didn’t pop a pill you shouldn’t have before your afternoon coffee. You’re not in a dream world. The billboard actually looks like that in real life and apparently it’s on purpose, the broken electronic billboard is being tested for all working colors. I see acid.

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A lot of ingenious products get their start on crowd source funding sites like Kickstarter. One of the coolest Kickstarter projects that went from dream to a reality was the 3Doodler, which shipped in October, that let people make 3D artworks. Another very cool product turned up on Kickstarter not too long ago called the […]

Here’s a fun kit that you can use to make simple electronics, even wearable ones. Circuit Stickers are just that – electronics with adhesive backing. The star of the kit are the LED stickers. Put them on a conductive surface – wire, foil, conductive thread or fabric etc. – connect a power source at one end and you have a light show.

If you want to add an element of interactivity to the LEDs, you can also get the Effects Stickers, the Sensor & Microcontroller Sticker or both. The Effects Sticker modifies the LEDs, making them blink, fade, twinkle or pulsate like a heartbeat. The Sensor & Microcontroller Sticker on the other hand adds a light sensor and a sound sensor to the mix. It also has a trigger that can turn on your Circuit Stickers for five seconds at a time.

Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Crowd Supply to get a Circuit Stickers Kit. Aside from the electronics themselves, each kit will also come with additional materials such as copper tape, coin cell batteries and binder clips so you can experiment out of the box. I think the Electric Paint Pen complements the kit well.

[via Boing Boing]