Digital dice roller

I decided on some last-second changes to the code before committing to the circuit board (it’s easy to change the code on an Arduino prototyping board, but less easy to do on a custom PCB with “raw” AVR atmega328 chip with none of the serial programming pins exposed).

I thought it would be cool to personalise the displays for each of the characters. So I grabbed a few free fonts and played about making a “logo imge” for each of the character “toppers” for the dice roller devices. I created an image of the character name then, using an online bitmap-to-byte-array tool, I created the code to make a different name display on each separate device.

To conserve battery power, each device goes into “deep sleep” after a period of about two minutes with no activity. To wake the device up (and activate the screen when it’s showing blank) simply bang it down on the table!

(the shutter speed of my phone camera means you can see the scan-lines being drawn on the OLED as it refreshes: these are not evident in the actual device!)

This is the base for “The Pastel Raven”. I forget which font was used, but the end result – I think – looks pretty nice!

To roll your dice is easy – simply tap the base onto your desk or tabletop once for for D6 or twice for two.

But what if you’re one of those quirky D&D players who insist on using D10s or percentile dice? We’ve got you covered:

Three taps on the base and the dice go out – chaning the set-up from D6 to D10. Now, when you bang it down, once rolls a single D10 and twice rolls two D10. Let’s not get into the whole argument about how to read percentile dice here and who is and who isn’t doing right or reading it wrong…. that can be for another day – this is supposed to be a bit of frivolous fun, right?!

And, to be honest, if D10s are going to get you all hot and bothered, simply bang the thing three times once again, and it’ll revert back to D6.

Now all I need to do is make another seven of these and glue the miniatures on the top…..