The Drum Roller - Automatic Dice tower

As part of the Hardware track of a hackathon at Texas A&M University, this project was completed in the span of 5 days. For this project I was working with Brett Dwyer, one of my close friends and an Electronic Systems Engineering Technology (ESET) major.

We chose to create a device that streamlined the process of dice rolling. Many table top games require the rolling of several dice in quick succession, a device that made the process more efficient as well as accessible would improve the gaming experience.

It rolls a specified number of dice. into the attached dice tray when a number is selected on the keypad. When the "Return Dice" button is pressed, the dice try is lifted up to dump the dice into the dice drum.

Additionally to this core functionality, there are 3 special modes:

• Demo Mode: pressing the labeled "Demo" button and then the number button to select the number of dice to roll. Once that is done, the dice will be dispensed then immediately returned to the cup. 

• Timed Return Mode: this acts like Demo Mode, but with a 7.5 second delay before returning the dice. This can be used to roll and return many dice quickly automatically. 

• Empty to Table Mode: this will raise the tray then spin the drum. This can be used to roll lots of dice without filling up the tray.

We identified several potential expansions for the design that we thought would make a bigger and better Drum Roller:

• Add several types of dice storage and dispersion: With 6 types of dice used in DND, it would be great to be able to dispense all kinds at the same time.

• Make remotely controlled: Thanks to the extra pins on the ATmega2560, we can easily add additional sensors to increase accessibility by making it voice-activated. Another possibility we identified was to connect the device using IoT to a discord Bot to allow players to join in remotely for tabletop games.

• Add 6-sided dice detection and roll counting: Rolling dice still requires reading them, so why not automate it further? For 6-sided dotted dice this would involve using openCV to detect blobs and count them. We started working on this functionality but were unable to refine it to the point of effective implementation.

• Read all kinds of dice: To increase functionality even further and read and any board game dice, we could use Machine Learning to identify the top faces of dice and then read the number (or shape) on the dice.