How the Drawdio was invented

Last month I wrote about Adafuit's Drawdio kit, an electronic pencil that lets you make music while you draw.

Later, I got an email from JJJ Silver, who invented the Drawdio, and I asked him to tell me how he came up with it. Here's what he said:

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 MacGyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink...

One day I bought a "harmonium" kit at the street market in Bangalore. 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.

• [Anonymous]

  I see these as a super cheap and easy way to make any object in the world be a controller for an electronic system dealing with gradient energy levels. For example, if you ran a couple of these through MIDI and designated a particular value for ranges of their electrical output, you could hook them up to a guitar and have that control the colors on your TiVO. Or have your movements in bed while you sleep control the light levels in your room.

• [wakeupsilver]

  Hey #2. That’s great! I’m working on this right now with an undergrad research assistant (on an HID board). I’ve been thinking of it as “Improvisational User Interfaces.” We should talk.

  Deltasleep: You’re right. The circuit is just a 555 timer in astable mode. I didn’t invent the circuit of course. Only thing I did was strap it onto a pencil and think about it differently.

• [Takuan]

  “Or have your movements in bed while you sleep control the light levels in your room.”

  in the biblical sense?

• [deltasleep]

  I don’t mean to rain on a parade, but this is a very common beginner’s practice circuit that’s included in a lot of “learn electronics” kits. This guy didn’t invent this- and I’m sure somebody somewhere had the sense to patent the circuit 50 years ago. Most likely, Radio Shack, who sold the beginners spring mount kits that commonly included this circuit.