Many of us are vaguely familiar with the levels of hell described in Dante’s epic poem from the 14th century, even if we’ve never visited ourselves. It’s natural to wonder in which circle of hell one might end up, but that’s a question that [scubabear’s] arcade build seeks to answer.
The stand-up cabinet was built for The Magic Castle, Hollywood’s exclusive private club for the magic set. The design is loosely inspired by old-fashioned love testers, the sort of which you might have seen in that Simpsons episode. The club has traditionally issued members with unique RFID tags in keychains, which can be used to trigger special objects in the facility. In this case, when a member scans their keychain and places their hand on a handprint, the machine starts up.
The hand is detected by an Adafruit touch sensor board, and the machine begins determining the fate of the member while playing a short musical interlude. Once calculated by the Raspberry Pi within, the user’s name is read out based on the RFID data, and their destiny is read aloud. They’re then given a receipt stating their destination in hell, along with a quote from Dante’s Inferno.
It’s a fun game and one that we’d love to try out if we find ourselves visiting The Magic Castle one spooky day. It’s made all the better by the sheer quality of the cabinet and the associated illustrations from [Jeremy Owen.]
For those keen to do something similar, [scubabear] hasn’t skimped on the details of the construction nor the electronics that make it all work. We’ve seen other great builds too, from the carefully crafted to the glowiest you’ve ever seen. Video after the break.
I recall the Magic Castle was featured in Bill Bixby’s TV series “The Magician”,
Yes, I am that old!
B^)
The strangest fortune telling machine I ever saw was in a mall reporting to be a handwriting analysis computer. It was a box with lots of blinking lights and some pretty obviously fake tape drives. But I kept thinking it looked familiar especially the console. You’d write something on a piece of paper and the operator would stick it into the slot and then push a button and the paper would feed into the slot and come out of another slot with some thing on it that says you know you are very well liked by your friends or something like a fortune cookie might say.
I finally realized why it looked familiar there was a box with the slots in it and it was shaped like an l because it was covering a frieden flexowriter And the only part exposed was the front panel buttons that controlled the tape reader.
So somebody had punched a long tape with a bunch of idles at the beginning and the end. You typed a bunch of fortunes then stop tape code. Then you carefully glue the tape together in a loop using the idle holes to align the start and end.
you feed that tape and every time you hit start tape you print out a fortune and then stops. Next time you hit start tape you get the next fortune typed on the piece of paper.
I couldn’t decide if I was disgusted or impressed at the simplicity and ridiculousness of it.
You are confined to (mumblejumblenonunderstandable) THREE. 3. As in “oneplusoneplus-er,letmelook,thereyougo-ONE”.
Light lights up and shows Number FOUR. As in “oops”.
Someone has had too much of something and nothing will change that thing. I think I am in hell circle 27.
“You are confined to the 4th circle, Greed”
“Greed!? I want my quarter back!”