Mr. Dice allows you to quickly chose and roll up to five dice of varying values, displaying both the roll for each individual die and the total value.

🎲 Mr. Dice - A dice rolling gadget

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2024-11-22 21:00:07

Mr. Dice allows you to quickly chose and roll up to five dice of varying values, displaying both the roll for each individual die and the total value.

Overall, this project was a big step forward for me in terms of hardware design and development. It was the first time I created a useful PCB for a project, the first time I used multi-color printing, and the first time I wrote a robust / stable application for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

I've always had a bit of a fixation on dice - there is something so fascinating about these little objects which embody randomness and chance. The fact that these little cubes are central to thousands of games - representing billions of hours of good times - is just so freaking cool.

However I did not originally plan to make a dice rolling gadget, in fact this project started as an attempt to learn KiCad, the fantastic open-source EDA (read: PCB designing) tool. After experiencing the pain of the wiring mess inside my PokeDex I desperately wanted to swap all those wires for a beautiful, clean circuit board.

Sadly, KiCad - like any complex tool - has quite a learning curve and since I knew nothing about electrical engineering I knew I needed to start with the basics. I followed a lovely intro to KiCad course by DigiKey which talked me through the basic terminology - footprints, layers, traces, etc.