A drained Magic 8 Ball gets a digital makeover with Raspberry Pi Pico, complete with physics-based floating die that reacts to movement.
Someone converted a drained Magic 8 Ball into a digital version using a Raspberry Pi Pico. It emulates the floating D20 on a round display that reacts to tilt, spin, and shakes. It uses an accelerometer to detect when it's shaken, and goes to sleep when at rest.
Well, what about when someone uses a Raspberry Pi to repair something that wasn't digital in the first place? This is the case of this Magic 8 Ball toy, which used to be full of real liquid, but has since been converted into a digital version using a Raspberry Pi. And yes, the system properly emulates the little die rattling around inside when you shake it.
This special Magic 8 Ball will tell your fortune through an emulated D20
It even floats around like the real thing
Credit: lds133
As spotted by Hackaday, this awesome little project comes to us via lds133 on GitHub. For reasons they don't explain, they had a Magic 8 Ball sitting around that had been drained of its liquid "long ago." Regardless of whether they drained it themselves or purchased a broken one, they got to gutting the Magic 8 Ball of its innards, replacing them with a Raspberry Pi Pico, and putting it back together again.
The result is really cool: You can see the digital equivalent of the Magic 8 Ball's D20 floating around in the GitHub project linked above; note how the dice moves as the ball is tilted and spun, acting as if it were actually submerged in liquid. Once you're done playing with it, you can set the Magic 8 Ball down, and it'll detect that it's at rest and put itself to sleep.
It's a cool remix of an old toy in a digital era, and I love it.
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