How to Make Your Own Tiny Electronic Dice with a Vinyl Cutter

Emiliano Valencia has an excellent tutorial explaining how you can fabricate your own PCBs at home.

Cameron Coward
4 years ago3D Printing / Gaming

I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m willing to bet that dice are the most common gaming accessory — yet they always seem to go missing when you need them for a nice game of Yahtzee or Parcheesi. So what do you do when you want to get your game on during quarantine? One solution is to make your own electronic dice at home. Emiliano Valencia has an excellent tutorial explaining how you can go about doing that, and you may be able to make it happen with tools and supplies you already have laying around your house.

These dice function in a very simple way. Six itty bitty LEDs are soldered onto a circuit board, along with a microcontroller and a momentary push button. Give that button a quick press and you’ll start the “roll” that eventually will end in a specific number being chosen. It’s about as straightforward as it possibly could be. An ATtiny85 microcontroller is used to generate the random number — though Valencia doesn’t provide much detail on the algorithm he used. That means we can’t comment on how truly random the number actually is. The ATtiny85 is also used to control the LEDs via PWM charlieplexing.

This project is particularly interesting because Valencia made the circuit board with the help of a vinyl cutter instead of using a PCB fabrication service. After designing the circuit and laying out the traces, he used the vinyl cutter to make stickers. Those were then applied to a blank copper circuit board. When it was placed in a bath of ferric chloride, the unneeded copper was etched away to leave behind just the copper traces. Additionally, he cut out a kapton solder mask and even a stencil to make it easy to apply the solder paste. That’s particularly useful since all of the components are surface mounted. The battery holder and optional keychain case can be 3D-printed. After assembly, you can build a simple jig to program the microcontroller and start rolling the dice!

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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