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Kauai Labs releases port of latest Invensense MPU-6050/9150 driver to Arduino Platform

As part of the development of the nav6 IMU firmware, Kauai Labs has ported the officially-released Invensense Motion Driver v. 5.1 – enabling its use in Arduino and Maple platforms.

Prior to the release of this library, Arduino developers wishing to access the Digital  Motion Processor (DMP) functionality of the Invensense MPU-6050/MPU-9150 sensor could not use an officially-released version of software; instead, a reverse-engineered library released by Jeff Rowberg (developed with help from Noah Zerkin) at www.i2cdevlib.com was used.  While the i2cdevlib library was excellent, it had not kept up with more recent releases by Invensense.

Kauai Labs hopes that other inventors find this open source library useful.

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Simple, New Inventor’s Tool – Makey Makey!

Many thanks to Ava Zbezda, one of Kauai’s young inventors in this summer’s “Inventing with Software and Electronics” class, for alerting us to this incredible new invention!  A team at the MIT Media Lab has created one of the simplest ever tools for inventors – a simple circuit board that can transform almost anything into a button.  Imagine playing your favorite video game using bananas from from your kitchen as buttons.  Or, imagine drawing buttons on paper with a pencil, and immediately using them as a typewriter.  The video below is highly recommended and demonstrates a number of different possibilities.  A Kauailabs personal favorite is the piano played by stepping on different stairs.

Makey Makey will be available in November at www.sparkfun.com.  Just in time to invent an interactive Christmas tree!