Magic 8 Ball Gives (Bad) Tech Advice

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the “Magic 8 Ball,” a toy designed to (vaguely) answer your burning questions. While still available, these devices originated before smartphones, and certainly seemed wondrous even if their fortune telling methodology “may” be a clever float mechanism.

Today, however, we have much more sophisticated methods of generating random answers and amusements. Combining new and old, Real-Time-Kodi was able to shoehorn a round LCD panel into a Magic 8 Ball where the floaty-answer display usually goes. It now provides answers to tech support questions.

Along with this display, his gadget uses an STM32F103C8 Blue Pill dev board for processing and an Adafruit LSM9DS1 IMU breakout to detect shaking. 18650 cells power the device and a TP4056 charging/protection board keeps it energized.

Hardware was chosen because ‘Kodi had it available, and with that settled he cut into the 8 Ball with a hacksaw to modify its innards. The round screen fit nicely into the normal display area, and 3D-printed parts were used to hold everything in place. Quite a bit of effort was put into the build to make it more power efficient, arguably a huge advantage of the non-powered original.

Although the project write-up isn’t meant to be a tutorial per-se, ‘Kodi plans to release the source code once it’s cleaned up and working reliably. For now you can ask it questions via its minder (‘Kodi) on Twitter or Mastadon. Maybe it will give you useful advice… if you can figure out what PC Load Letter means.