The Levels of Hell: Dante's Inferno 2.0

The Magic Castle® has had a tradition of making souvenir keychains for the members that contain RFID chips inside them.  This allows us to build gags that can be specially triggered, which is a fun & magical thing for Castle guests to do.  Additionally we can have the RFID linked to information about the key's owner, like calling them by name.

The tribute to the Lament Box from Hellraiser houses the RFID reader board, a 24-LED Adafruit Neopixel ring, and a PCB made by Michael Volchock that does the I2C to the reader, transmits it via RS485 to whatever it is controlling (in my case, Raspberry Pi 3s), and does a little animation on the Neopixel ring when the RFID is read.  I found a lament box STL on Thingiverse and added the little devil and the hell-level numbers.  

Then I printed a set on my Form2, made silicone molds from the 3D prints, and cast & painted 12 of them for the other gags at the Castle this year, although I only needed one of them for the arcade cabinet.

There are two ways to activate the Sorter Cabinet.  The preferred way is swipe your little devil keyfob and place your hand on the handprint.  The "handprint" is a resin cast that looks like a hand pressed into stone.  Behind the resin handprint is some copper foil tape to act as antenna for the Adafruit touch sensor board.  When the handprint is touched, the Sorter is triggered and the fun begins.  The Sorter will play a musical selection for 20 seconds while it assesses your sins and determines your eternity.  Then it will say your name, the level of hell you deserve, and print a paper receipt with the level, Jeremy's illustration and a quote from Dante's Inferno.  If you don't have a keyfob, just placing your hand there will trigger it, but it will call you a "lost soul" rather than call you by name.

It amuses me greatly that the voice that announces your eternal fate sounds just like Alexa.

I wanted Jeremy Owen to create an illustration for each of the 9 Levels of Hell in Dante's Inferno.  Jeremy was hip to the idea and got started right away.  I was really in love with the illustrations of Gustave Doré (I knew his work from an illustrated version of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner").  Doré also did an illustrated version of Dante's Inferno... I considered using this (public domain FTW!) but the formats of the illustrations varied so much it would be a project in itself just to try to reformat to something that would work for my tester thing.  I also really liked the work of Edward Gorey, Gris Grimley and of course Heironymous Bosch, but I also really wanted Jeremy's own style and to see what he'd come up with.  I was not disappointed!

	"Limbo"

	"Fraud"

	"Treachery"

I was inspired by those "love tester" games that were popular in the 1930s-60s in arcades everywhere.

I wanted to do something along these lines but I only had a few weeks' time and my wood-working skills were no where close to being able to make a Victorian-style cabinet.  I kept looking at other love-tester designs (there are many!) and I happened across a more modern-looking one:

Even though a Victorian-style cabinet would better fit the overall aesthetic of The Magic Castle, I liked a lot of features of this one, specifically its bold use of color, the thermometer-like "readout", and the little illustrations.  This part of the love tester reminded me of the panel that has the readouts on a pinball game... a plan was forming, one that I thought I could actually make in time for the opening of Halloween Week at the Castle..  Why not update the "love tester" idea to something really modern, like a video arcade cabinet?  I knew I could buy precut kits from various online companies, and if I farmed out the artwork too then I could focus on the electronics and figure out how to fabricate it... Time to contact my friend Jeremy Owen, a comic book artist in the bear community, and see if he was up to take on a commission to do some illustrations and design these graphics.