A spirit board (or talking board…or best known by Hasbro’s trademark Ouija® board) is a parlor game that lore would suggest can channel the words of the departed. The reality is more innocuous…but the spirit board’s appearance in horror films such as The Exorcist have built up its supernatural reputation and made spirit board imagery a Halloween staple.

Participants place their hands on a planchette — think of it like a supernatural mouse cursor — which mysteriously moves to spell out messages.

In this project, HalloWing acts as the planchette, moving around an invisible spirit board that can be seen only through the HalloWing’s display. The onboard accelerometer reacts to subtle tilting to scroll around the board, or touch one of the capacitive pads to have the oracle spell out a message on its own. The powerful SAMD21 processor gives us buttery smooth animation!

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Everything needed for this project is built into the HalloWing board, no extra components are required.

This guide was first published on Aug 30, 2018. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

Text editor powered by tinymce.