What If Your Dice Rolls Controlled LED Lighting Effects?

Tabletop roleplaying games are all about exploring the worlds created in the collective imaginations of players and game masters. As such, most of the game happens entirely within the players’ heads. But some real-world visuals can certainly enhance the experience. The classic example of that is the miniature, which might represent a player character, an enemy, or anything else in the world. However, if you think about it, dice rolls are as important as everything else. With that in mind, Jonathan Diamond gave those rolls life by using dice to control LED lighting effects.

Diamond’s Pixels Dice Box is — as the name suggests — a box for Pixels “smart dice.” Those are pretty incredible in their own right, because they’re packed full of LEDs, sensors, and Bluetooth connectivity. They can do really neat things like light up and send dice roll data to a player’s smartphone for logging. In theory, it should even be possible to use the dice in online game sessions. But when gaming IRL, most people aren’t going to want to have their phones out and so they’re only going to see effects on the dice’s built-in LEDs. Diamond’s Pixels Dice Box has a bigger array of LEDs, so players get a little show with every roll to really get everyone excited.

Imagine, for instance, that you roll a nat 20. Very exciting! The Pixels Dice Box can recognize that and show a little celebratory light show. Conversely, in the event of a critical failure, it can play a more ominous LED effect. It also has animations for rolling, to show a 1D graph of previous rolls, and more.

That’s all possible thanks to a LILYGO T-QT Pro, which is a little ESP32-S3-based development board with a small built-in color display and buttons. The ESP32-S3 has Bluetooth/BLE capability, which is how it connects to the Pixels dice to receive information on rolls. Based on the those rolls and the current settings, it then controls the animations playing on a string of WS2812b individually addressable RGB LEDs using the popular WLED library. Diamond put those components into a small jewelry box repurposed as a dice box, but any case with enough room would work.

Pixels dice are currently only available for pre-order, but anyone who is lucky enough to get their hands on some will probably want to duplicate Diamond’s project. Luckily, he was kind enough to post his code and a guide.