How will you die? Running with scissors? A whale falling on your head? Learn the future cause of your own untimely demise with maker Stuart Gorman's Tragic Fate Ball, a DIY take on the Magic 8-Ball that's darker and more digital than the original toy that inspired it. Details in the video below. From Hackster.io:
There are only a few electronic components inside of the Tragic Fate Ball. Those include an Arduino Nano board, a 1.6" LCD screen, three mercury tilt switches, and a lithium-ion battery. The Arduino controls the LCD screen via an SPI connection. A small amount of liquid mercury fills each switch and that facilitates an electrical connection when the switch is in the proper orientation. That saves battery life by only turning on the device when the user flips it over. The Arduino sketch selects a message with a randomly-generated number. It starts with a seed taken with the first two bytes from EEPROM and then increments the number by one. This is a far cry from a true random number generator (TRNG), but the spirits should be able to work with that just as well as they can a Magic 8-Ball.
