Once I finished the build and uploaded the software, I informed my girlfriend that she would have to “drink for science!” Needless to say, she happily did her part. The next several days were spent playing with it and whatever alcohol we could find around my office.

The open-source DrinkDuino Game software uses the DrinkShield API and is a big hit with everyone. It’s simple enough for a drunk to play, but fun enough to keep them interested. DrinkShield developer Craig Smith is incredibly helpful, and when I had some issues setting up the game, he helped me stumble though. All in all, DrinkDuino is a must for any get-together featuring adult beverages. Cheers!

Each board drives one automotive ignition coil, and you can control one or more using an Arduino microcontroller (not included). Designers Brett Downing and Daniel Harmsworth, of the Artifactory hackerspace in Perth, Australia, used these boards to build their Polyplasmic Arcophone, a giant instrument that features 13 Jacob’s ladders, zapping out music!

Created by Daryll Strauss of Los Angeles hackerspace Crash Space, these open source boards come four to a pack and are the perfect large-group build for people just learning to solder. They’re easy to assemble, and a hundred people building them can collaborate to create gigantic, blinking trails of light. Best of all, to see the dominoes fall another time, you don’t have to stack them all back up. Just press the first domino’s button again.

The Thingamagoop 2 features a square wave amplitude modulator and triangle wave pulse width modulator, packed into a lovely silkscreened metal enclosure. The Thingamagoop’s signature component is an LED on a bendable wire antenna called the LEDacle, which looks cool and, more importantly, interfaces with the light sensor hidden in the eye, making for a huge range of possible sounds.

I found the build to be rather challenging. It took me a couple of hours to make, with one or two tricky steps. One thing I appreciated was that unlike other Bleep Labs kits, you don’t need anything but the kit itself to make cool music — there’s no need to plug into anything. When I finally finished my Thingamagoop, I turned it on and watched as my kids snatched it out of my hands and ran off with it.

While the Thingamagoop is obviously kid-friendly, it offers some cool features for mom and dad to explore further. For instance, I’m intrigued that you can reprogram its ATmega328 chip using an Arduino.