This Digital Dice Roller Looks Like a Tactile Dream
Zane Bauman never has to worry about accidentally rolling dice off the table ever again, because he built the DigiRoll.
Everything in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons comes down to imagination and dice rolls. Most normies are only familiar with the six-sided die used with pedestrian board games, but D&D requires several others. As such, players tend to end up with a whole bunch of dice and they can become hard to manage. Digital dice roller devices handle all of that with the power of transistors, but they aren’t as fun as physically rolling dice. That’s why Zane Bauman gave his custom DigiRoll device a nifty tactile knob that the player gets to spin to activate a roll.
If all we cared about was practicality, then a smartphone app would suffice. But that’s boring and the DigiRoll device is cool and fun. It has a four-digit seven-segment display that shows the selected die type and the result of the roll. A line of buttons on the bottom let the user select the die (d4, d10, d20, etc.) and giving a die’s button subsequent presses will increase the multiplier (1d4 to 2d4 and so on). The “CLR” button resets that and there is an on/off switch for power.
The real star of the show, however, is the mechanism for starting a roll. That is a big d20-shaped knob that the user gets to spin. The spin doesn’t seem to actually affect the outcome of the dice roll (which is a good thing) — it just tells the device to go ahead and generate a random number. Spinning that dice knob is just a lot more fun that pushing a button.
Instead of relying on a development board, Bauman decided to design his own PCB around a Microchip ATtiny84 microcontroller. He created that PCB in KiCAD and had it fabricated by JLCPCB. The PCB also hosts an 8-bit encoder, a shift register, a driver for the display, and connections for the buttons. The ATtiny84 detects the knob spin through a Hall effect sensor. Bauman programmed that functionality using the Arduino framework in PlatformIO, paying particular attention to power consumption. Power comes from a pair of AA batteries, so efficiency extends their life as much as possible.
The enclosure is a simple 3D-printed affair. But it looks nice, especially because Bauman took a multi-color printing approach to give the buttons blue icons that look great in contrast to the black body. Now Bauman never has to worry about accidentally rolling dice off the table ever again.