OuijaCNC

Spooky season is officially upon us. Check out this self-playing Ouija board built by one of our colleagues. Spooky season is upon us, so it seems only fitting to share with you a Halloween-themed project that I’ve been working on at home.

Inspired by videos of self-playing chessboards driven by magnets beneath the board, I decided to apply the same approach to creating an Ouija board that spells out messages without the touch of human hands. The build The first step in the project was to create a lightweight core XY CNC machine. For this I drafted in my husband, and he was able to put something together within a couple of days using 3D-printed parts, fishing line, some motors, and an ESB32 that he had lying around.

(The core XY he built for this project turned out so well that he used what he learnt to make a slightly beefier version as the basis for a CNC plasma cutter.) He also put together a wooden enclosure made of plywood and moulding, which he then turned over to me for decoration. A bit of wood stain and gold spray paint brought it a little closer in style to the golden age of Spiritualism. After determining how much of the box’s surface the planchette could cover, I made a stencil to apply the letters to that area.

That left a lot of blank space on the surface where, inside the box underneath, space was taken up by the axes and electronics.