The Skull of Fate SAO Turns Your Favorite Badge Into a Tarot-Reading Mystic for Spooky Season

Pseudonymous makers "Make It Hackin" and "p1x317h13f" have designed a Simple Add-On (SAO) accessory to get any badge ready for the spooky season: the Skull of Fate SAO, an interactive tarot device.

"The Skull of Fate SAO is a modern take on a tarot card inspired by ancient Greek mythology," Make It Hackin explains. "The Moirai — also known as the Fates — were the personifications of destiny. They were three sisters: Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the allotter), and Atropos (the inevitable, a metaphor for death). The Skull of Fate represents Atropos, providing you with a unique tarot reading about the future. Each reading is an interpretation of the cards and their meaning from the original 78 card Rider Waite tarot deck."

The Skull of Fate does not, as a badge add-on, include 78 tarot cards; in a concession to portability, it is instead a compact PCB adorned by custom-made skull artwork with LED matrix eyes. In its default mode, it's simply aesthetic: the eyes show a range of animations programmed into its Microchip SAM D21 and linked flash memory chip, some of which are modified according to inputs to on-board microphone, HX3144ESO Hall effect, and Adafruit LIS3DH accelerometer sensors, the colors of which can be changed using a button to the right.

Holding both buttons down, however, activates tarot mode — drawing one of the 78 cards at random from its digital tarot deck and making it available to any nearby device with a near-field communication (NFC) reader. "Simply hold the reading device above the card any time after pressing both buttons to receive your reading," Make It Hackin explains.

Source code and design files for the add-on are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license; additional information is available on Hackaday.io.