Travis Bumgarner's Dice of Sending Are Bluetooth-Connected Dice for Fairer Digital Roleplays
Forget pointing a camera at a dice tray, just grab your IMU-packing D6 and transmit the result automatically.
Maker and role playing-game enthusiast Travis Bumgarner has built a die with a difference: it's got Bluetooth connectivity, to guarantee there's no cheating going on during a play-over-the-wire digital game session.
"When a Dungeon Master insists you roll in plain sight, the Dice of Sending offer a clever loophole," Bumgarner explains of his creation. "These enchanted dice are linked by invisible arcane currents (or Bluetooth, depending on your realm’s tech level), allowing a roll in both the physical and digital planes simultaneously. Those attuned to the Dice of Sending may appear obedient while still indulging their chaotic good nature—rolling fairly, yet unpredictably."
The size of the die in question gives away its technological nature: inside the 3D-printed shell of a D6 is a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller connected to a battery and a Bosch Sensortec BMI160 three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. The XIAO nRF52840's built-in Bluetooth radio is connected to a web app running on a nearby computer, and the die rolled — with the IMU determining that face is uppermost and, thus, which number has been rolled.
Naturally, a 3D-printed die with uneven weighting from its inner components isn't necessarily going to roll fairly — though Bumgarner gathered stats from 210 test rolls and found a reasonable spread, with the least-rolled numbers (2 and 6, 31 rolls each) only ten rolls away from the most-rolled number (3, 41 rolls).
Design files and source code for the project have been released on GitHub under an unspecified license.