Monday, October 29, 2012

Madame Cassandra, The Fortune Telling Machine


My favorite part of the party this year was the fortune telling machine we made.



Madame Cassandra is built from a mannequin housed in a glass-fronted cabinet, dressed and decorated with orange and purple globe lights, a purple lightbulb, silk fabric, a tablecloth, a crystal ball, tarot cards, a candle, and a skull.


Inside the cabinet is a card shoe loaded with fortunes.  When the button is pressed, a small rubber "finger" powered by a servo motor and a microcontroller reaches out and plucks the top card from the stack and drops it into the chute below.


Dev programmed the machine so that in resting mode the lit button slowly "breathes."  When the button is pressed, all the lights eerily jangle and flicker and the music starts up.  The music is a calliope rendition of Chopin's funeral march, "Trauermarsch," which we found here on YouTube.



Madame Cassandra in action:


The machine is loaded with approximately 300 fortune cards (I wrote a little more than 100 unique fortunes and printed three copies of each).  I was very pleased that the first fortune of the night was the simple message "Run."
 
 
Thank you, thank you so much to Amy Robb for finding the perfect thrift store cabinet and then dragging it home, to Sam Thompson and James Sarrett for staying up very late with Dev working on the programming, and to Lilli Thompson for helping me write the fortunes.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:55 AM

    Hey, this is brilliant. I would love to build a mchine like this but havent got a clue about the electronics!? Any Help???

    My email is piggygoof@yahoo.co.uk

    ReplyDelete

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