Add Electronic Interactivity to an IKEA LUSTIGT Spinning Prize Wheel

You know IKEA as that furniture store that also sells meatballs, and which your city probably went bonkers for when it first opened. But, they don’t just sell fashionable furniture that requires an engineering degree to assemble and a month of use to destroy. They also sell some pretty cool toys, including the LUSTIGT, which is a spinning prize wheel. While the LUSTIGT is purely mechanical, you can upgrade it to include electronic interactivity by following Baptiste Adrien’s Wonder Wheel guide.

This upgrade will display the results from the LUSTIGT on a computer, which opens up a whole world of possibilities. You could, for instance, use it for some kind of custom game, or for prize giveaways on your Twitch channel. To retrofit your LUSTIGT with the Wonder Wheel functionality, you’ll need a Particle Photon, an RC522 RFID reader, and at least 24 RFID sticker tags. You can probably guess how this works: a tag is placed on the back side of each of the wheel segments, and the reader checks to see which tag it lands on when you spin the wheel.

Putting it together is dead simple, just assemble the wheel, add the tags, and mount the reader. Then install Adrien’s wheel.ino sketch on the Particle Photon. A custom React app is used to take the RFID readings from the Photon and display the results. All you have to do is create a library of the 24 tags, and you can start spinning your Wonder Wheel! It’s a fun and affordable way to build an interactive prize wheel that would be perfect for your next game night.