This Guy Built a Big-Style Fortune Teller

Remember the movie Big? It came out in 1988 and starred Tom Hanks. With almost 40 years of hindsight, I think it is safe to say that the most memorable part of the film was the Zoltar fortune-telling machine that kicks off the entire plot (and definitely not the problematic romantic relationship). I’m not entirely sure how common those were in real life before the movie came out, but the movie cemented the concept in pop culture. To pay homage to that, Robert (AKA Oh well why not) built his own fortune teller and it is, frankly, kind of creepy. Meet Lilith.

This shares many traits with Zoltar from Big— primarily that it is an arcade cabinet-size machine, that it contains a humanoid animatronic figure, and that it provides fortunes. But it differs in aesthetics and in how it conveys fortunes.

In Big, Zoltar provides a fortune in the form of a printed slip of paper. That made sense for the technology of the era and also for the movie’s plot. But Robert didn’t have those constraints, so he made his machine read the fortunes out loud.

The artificial psychic inside the box is also far more sophisticated. Zoltar was a very simple animatronic — in real life, it would likely be entirely electromechanical. Robert’s psychic is partially a full-fledged robot. From the shoulders up, it is an InMoove 3D-printed robot. You might have seen one of those before, because they’re pretty darn impressive. But to simplify things, the torso is fixed and the arms move with a couple of servos underneath the table.

An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls the servo motors (for both the arms and the head/face) through a 16-channel servo driver. It then plays audio through a CH9311-TF audio playback module going to an 8” speaker. The fortune teller comes to life and does its thing at the push of a large 100mm arcade button.

That all fits inside of a cabinet that Robert constructed specifically for this project. To simplify a massive part of the work he put into it, that is pretty much just 2x4s and plywood. The cabinet then got painted with a lovely shade of pink and dressed up with the appropriate ornamentation, while Lilith herself got a horrendous blonde wig and a mystical scarf. Some LED accent lighting completes the package.

Robert built this for Halloween to entertain trick-or-treaters and it was a big hit. According to him, some visitors even thought the psychic was a real woman in a costume. Nevertheless, Lilith is a fantastic modernization of Zoltar.