We’re celebrating 48 hours of DIY stuff here as we get ready for Handmade Music tomorrow night in Brooklyn! Thingamagoops are the friendly, optical emitter antennaed electronic creatures. Whether your cat / significant other / fan base would describe them as a sweet-sounding instrument, they do make a lot of noise and look cute in the process. Optical sensors onboard mean you can reposition the lights for some fun.

They were fun to begin with. But in kit form, you’ve got even more good times as you assemble them / find an odd case to put them in.

The kits come with groovy labels, eyes and mouths a la Mr. Potato-Head (well, in sticker form), and all the knobs and parts and things you need to make it work. A kit will set you back US$55. If you can’t be bothered to find an enclosure but still want to have some assembly, the enclosure-included version is US$66.

ThingamaKIT Product Page

And for an example build not by the Bleep Labs folks, MAKE shows off the build process:

ThingamaKIT build photos [MAKE: Blog]

I hope we’ll see more of this kind of kit in muso land soon.

But here’s why appropriated enclosures are enviro-friendly and fun – from Flickr, an example of an enclosure rescued from an old desktop intercom by Bleep Labs creator Dr. Bleep.