Electric oracle
July 2021
While browsing around Adafruit's site, I came across the large version of the Sharp Memory Display. If you haven't seen one in person, it's a real treat to look at. It's like an LCD display, but it doesn't have a backlight, or shades of gray — pixels are either on or off, and it just reflects whatever ambient light is around. It has a really pleasant, calm appearance, while still being fairly high-resolution. I ordered one and used it to make the Electric Oracle, as a gift for a friend. An "oracle deck" is kind of like a tarot deck, in that there's a set of cards you can draw in different patterns that give you different concepts to meditate on, or use to sort through your feelings about something. This gadget is like an electric version of that, with little animated generative art cards. I also threw in a virtual magic 8 ball, and a moon phase calendar for fun.
I wanted to have a few buttons, but mostly to just let the display shine and do its thing passively. I decided to put the bulk of the electronics in the base, and let the display stand in a slender upright form.
Here's the circuit prototype. The module on top of the Adafruit Feather board there is a real-time clock module I used, so I could track the current date and time for an accurate moon phase estimation. While working on the Dither Clock later, I actually realized these RTC modules need to be calibrated... so this has likely drifted a bit, hopefully only by a few hours though. It was a gift so I can't easily get it back to calibrate it!
I wanted to add a moon phase calendar, and found this handy guide to calculating the moon phase from the current date. This technique is quite basic — counting the number of days from a known new moon, dividing by the lunar period, and taking the fractional part as progress through the current cycle. That guide uses a reference moon from January 6th, 2000, expressed as a Julian Date. I thought these forumlae were pretty neat, so I actually just made that the UI of the moon phase calendar. You can kinda watch the device calculate the phase from scratch! At the bottom of that screen (which you can see at the end of the video above) is a progress bar indicating where you are in the current lunar cycle.
This enclosure was pretty straightforward, though I was still pretty new to 3D printing at this time. The front and back just kinda snap together, and it worked out... ok.
I think the graphics are very cute though, and it was fun to come up with little generative art programs. There are 36 of them! I think this was a spiritual precursor to the visual programs of my video synth.
The "cards" in this virtual oracle deck are: Zero, One, Infinity, Undefined, Decay, Growth, Chaos, Control, Balance, Power, Noise, Knowledge, Mutation, Process, Focus, Magic, Glitch, Security, Memory, Connection, Integration, Self, Other, Emergent, AND, OR, Stars, Friends, Cycles, Wave, Delete, Home, Input, Output, Key, Human
