Building a Zoltar Fortune Teller: Part Two

Work has continued on the Zoltar fortune telling machine and there has been quite a bit of progress made. Here is where the latest project video and steps I've taken so far.


The miniature concept that I made prior to this build worked really well with the marker pointing towards the answer, but I didn't think it works when scaled up, so an alternative needed to be found. As the crystal ball is one of the main props with any fortune telling machine, I decide to use the crystal ball to indicate the YES / NO answer and what better way that turning it the colour red for NO and green for YES. As I like to try and incorporate materials in my builds that have been salvaged, I went on the hunt for a suitable crystal ball and found this old glass lamp that is perfect for the job, plus it lights up perfectly when lit from its base.

For this functionality I'm using another Microbit as the one currently running Zoltar's coin acceptor and blinking eyes has no scope for anything additional. I'm using a Zip Halo for the lights as this works really well with the board. Coding the Halo is a little tricky to start with but once the basics have been learnt you can achieve quite a great deal.

When idle and waiting for a coin to be put into the slot, the Halo cycles through a number of random colours to hopefully grab the attention of passers-by. When a coin triggers the first Microbit, the blinking eyes are activated and the servo that previously moved the pointer, not activates the second Microbit and breaks the random cycle of colours before illuminated green or red for a few seconds before reverting back to random again. The code for crystal ball is explained better in the video.

When the Halo is placed underneath it illuminates rather well and fills the whole crystal ball with the colour from below.

Once I was happy everything was working, I then starting giving the frame and 3d printed face a bit of a paint job and even the small amount of paint has improved the appearance no end.




Comments

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