Imagine you could draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGuyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink…

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 ladyada.net/make/drawdio/ for a full set of instructions are here: