Hey, my name is Ayah Mahmoud (she/they) and I’m an undergrad Design major
(Course 4B). I love fabrication and I love viewing design through an
artistic and personal lens. My interests in this course are to learn
electrical skills, and to maybe explore my interests in the occult.
an evil eye necklace that captures evil eyes of people around you
and then it tells you hex spells you can put on people
Clip on performative toys turned into intrusive objects
A Tarot Tutor
FINAL PROJECT
IDEAS + INTERESTS
TAROT TEACHER
FINISHING UP THE PROJECT
I. DESIGN AND MODELING
II. FABRICATION
III. CODE
IV. ELECTRONICS
V. PROTOTYPE AND FINAL VIDEO
Tarot Guide + Information Scraping
Arduino Code
PCB Design
ELECTRONICS
SEE ASSIGNMENTS 07 & 08
I’ve always been intrigued by mysticism and spiritual practices. I think I
would like to explore ways in which technology can work with people
rituals and practices.
“The Tarot is a symbolic map of consciousness that encompasses our
journey through life, both spiritually and practically.”
Sage Goddess
, 2025
Tarot is a card divination practice, used for self-reflection, spiritual
insight, and more popularly known for “fortune telling.” Within a tarot
deck, there are 72 cards, each with their own distinct meanings and
significance, which tarot readers use in addition to the layout/spread to
interpret messages and advice from a higher source.
Yay!
I’ve been reading tarot for the past five years, and despite my
familiarity with my deck (pictured above!), I still struggle sometimes to
interpret some spreads. Whether it’s needing to constantly stop the
reading to open up my guide book to remember the nuances within each card
or waiting to ask for a second opinion on card pairs and groups, reading
tarot is a skill that’s necessary to constantly refresh upon.
But what if there was an assistant that did
Got a small prototype of the device working using an RFID reader, NFC
Tags, and engraved 1/16” cardstock paper.
10/04 Thoughts
WNDR Museum Oracle Inspo
(Nov 15th)
AI Psychosis and Spirituality
I watched a couple videos about AI psychosis and I’d be lying if I was
completely okay with the idea of integrating AI into a spiritual device
when AI has been known to go off the rails and purposefully feed into (and
even create...) people’s spiritual delusions.
There is also the moral/spiritual dilemma of using an AI or techology to
connect with spirits or guides in general. AI is not sentient and will
never give you a reading as nuanced and personal as a human being who has
a close relationship with their deck and I think it is worth having the
user question why they need a spoon fed interpretation.
After talking to some of my friends who also read tarot, it became pretty
apparent that most tarot readers don’t necessarily want to mix AI into
their spiritual practices for various reasons. From not believing in that
AI can grasp large ideas such as spirituality without over-representing
and generalizing certain spirital ideologies, to simply not wanting to
contribute to the climate crisis through the use of AI.
The other issue is having consent from the spirit to even get an AI
interpretation. So, to mitigate these issues, I’m thinking about having
some other sort of analogue divination system, such as dice or dosing
rods, or even just another tarot deck with absolute randomness, that way
the universe is given the choice on whether or not you need to hear the AI
message.
At the WNDR Museum there is an “Oracle” exhibit, where users can press a
button to “talk” to an animatronic oracle who muses about life and the
cosmos before printing out a fortune! It does not run using any AI or
“sensing” other than the button. I found the animatronic to be really
off-putting, especially because his lips were glazed and moving like he
was actually talking and his frame, hands, and head would move chunkily as
well.
I really enjoyed this fortune format! The little image was quite cute, and
it gave me a nice reference for how a fortune could read using an LLM...
not to specific, not too general!
FINAL PROJECT TASKS
Record all NFC card label IDs
Create Meeting Chart with IDs in Excel (convert .xl>.csv>.json)
Remill board+test meanings
Make/buy mat (maybe cast with silicone and have wires inside the
cast?)
Make (3D print, Cast, CNC or something) mat elements!
Maybe integrate chatgpt
I broke the frame into 8 pieces in order to fit it within the print bed
25cmx25cm constraint of the P1S Bamboo printers. I printed in white PLA
knowing that I wanted to spray the piece. I ended up doing 9 rounds of
printing.
I then sanded the entire frame with a rougher to finer grit, superglued
together, and sprayed plastic primer before any colored sprays. I then
sprayed the piece with a bottom layer of matte silver spray paint and
built up to using an iredescint spray for a rougher metal look to add to
the retro aesthetic.
TarotGuide.zip
Fusion Model
I wanted to source all my information from my favorite tarot website:
www.tarotguide.com. It has such a great library of info on each tarot card
and its respective meanings.
Because I would need the individual definitions of 72 cards (in addition
to each cards meanings in context of 7 different types of tarot readings)
I tried making a code that would scrape all of that information instead of
manually having to copy paste that into a .csv file. But I kept running
into the website’s Cloudfare bot blockers and malware protection...
suprizingly, the website was really well protected and I couldn’t get a
code to pull anything directly from the website. :(
I noticed though, while looking through the website’s set up that each
card’s page was saved as an individual .html document that I could
download onto my computer, so instead, I just saved each card’s webpage
and ran my scraper internally through my files! It organized all the
information for me into a .csv that I could later turn into a .h and .js
file that my arduino IDE and OpenAI API can read, respectively.
Then this document was turned into TarotCards.h, that I used in my Arduino
code to grab tarot card meanings when scanned, and cardDataBase.js, that I
used to call to OpenAI to generate meanings to overall readings. I used
javascript and python code to exchange from the .csv file format.
Since I was working with a larger color display module, I decided to
design a loading screen and background for the card meanings in
Illustrator. To display these images, I needed to convert them into .h
RGB888 file format. I honestly spent a huge amount of time just
troubleshooting the monitor and finding the right display driver to use
because there were so many different versions of the larger LED Modules. I
finally found the correct display driver for the ST7796S 4.0 inch display
module (<Adafruit_ST7796S_kbv.h>) and was able to display them.
