Reddit maker MrShatanas found four large old circuit boards in a garage and decided they were too good-looking to throw away. One of them is now a piece of sci-fi wall art: a 3D-printed frame packed with lights, a slow-motion fan and a pointer that answers YES or NO to your questions. A single Waveshare ESP32-C6 board with a built-in 1.47 inch LCD runs the whole thing.
A 1993 arcade board as the centerpiece
The board itself is the star. It has a JAMMA edge connector, two Motorola 68000 processors and a Yamaha YM2151 sound chip, with chips dated 1993, which points to an old arcade game board. The maker has not identified the exact game yet and has three more boards like it. The new electronics are built into the frame around it.
How the effects work
A PIR sensor (HC-SR501) wakes everything up when someone walks into the room. The ESP32-C6's own LCD plays a fake "AI thinking" animation, while a 0.91 inch SSD1306 OLED on I2C scrolls made-up system telemetry. An addressable LED strip fakes hard-drive and LAN activity lights, glowing "fuses" and a sound level meter, and a backlit logo sits behind a swappable faceplate.
The neatest trick is the slow-motion fan. A 40 mm 12 V fan runs on PWM while a short piece of white 12 V LED strip flashes as a strobe at around 135 Hz, with flashes of about 0.9 ms. Both are switched through a ULN2003 driver. The result is that the blades look like they are barely turning, the same stroboscope effect used to inspect spinning machinery.
Then there is the oracle. Press the button and a tiny linear stepper, driven by an L9110, swings a pointer to YES or NO after a few random "hesitations" first. In the maker's words, it is not connected to the internet, knows nothing and answers confidently anyway.
Our take
This is mostly off-the-shelf modules, wiring and firmware, and that is the point: a PIR, an OLED, a strobe and a small stepper turn a dead board into something people stop to look at. The strobe-frozen fan is worth copying on its own. If you want to try the display side, our guide to interfacing an OLED display is a good start, and the build can be seen running in the maker's short video.
Image credit: MrShatanas / Reddit, cropped and resized.
About the author: Aswinth Raj is an electronics engineer and the editor of CircuitDigest, where he has published more than 150 hands-on projects and tutorials across Arduino, PIC, ESP32, Raspberry Pi and EV battery systems. He selects the stories on this page for what engineers and makers can actually learn or build from. Connect on LinkedIn
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