HOWTO make a fur-lined barbarian forearm bracer with a digital D&D dice-roller built in

The wizards at Sparkfun, an open source hardware company, show us how to make one of these spiffy furry barbarian leather arm-bracers with a charmingly anachronistic D&D dice-roller built into, built around a Lilypad soft Arduino controller.

I’ve got nothing but respect for the DIY/open source community who take conductive thread, LEDs, and Arduino boxes and make them into marvelous little working crafts. I find it all a bit above my metaphorical pay grade. However, if there was anything that was going to convince me to learn how to rig a circuit, it would be the project that Dia forwarded to us yesterday. ,p> It’s a fur-lined leather gauntlet that can roll 100, 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4-sided dice with the flip of a switch and the shake of a forearm. It combines my love of tabletop with my desire to live in the future where we all poke our wrists to get things done.

Theoretically, there's a complete tutorial for this beauty, but it's 404 at the moment. The link below goes to The Mary Sue's writeup.

New Life Goal: Make a Leather Bracer that Rolls Dice

• [Michael Hord]

  Oddly, the link above is to the actual 404 page for SparkFun. The tutorial is here:
  http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/333 

• [coryf]

  Reminds me of the book Quagmire Keep, in which a RPG group finds themselves transported into their characters.  To represent the dice, each has a bracer with the usual multi-sided dice that start rolling at key times in the plot.

• [thaum]

  Make cool electronic dice roller. Add secret keyswitch to bias rolls when you’re wearing it.

  • [jerwin]

    Player: “Oh you shouldn’t have. You really shouldn’t have!”
    DM: “At least try it just for this session. I put a lot of work into it.”
    Player: “I’ll use the dice roller, but you can’t make me wear it.”
    DM: “Fine by me.”
    Player: “Why am I fumbling so often?”
    DM: “I installed a secret keyswitch to bias the dice. If you wear it, the dice will be honest.”
    Player: “Oh, all right then,”
    *Click*
    DM: “I should warn you, however, that the armband feeds off the entropy of your soul…”

• [Marc Mielke]

  I prefer Science Fiction tabletop. Maybe one built into a Pip-Boy? 

  • [Mordicai]

    I WANT.

• [robuluz]

  Whoa! That’s totally bad-ass!!! Walk right into that biker joint, slam your fist on the bar, tell em you want a beer and make it fast! Anyone gives you trouble, just roll that baby over a little so they can see the built in D&D dice roller. You got a problem? No. Didn’t think so. Mutha fucka.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    I usually just borrow the dishwasher’s shoes and dance on the bar.

    • [robuluz]

      We might be talking about different biker joints. Mine only exists in movies. They park their hogs out the front in a row like dominos, there’s constant fighting going on, and one of them wears the exact same size leathers as Arnold Schwarzenegger. They all stop and scowl when you walk in, and you either beat them all up with your amazing superhuman martial arts skills, or win them over with your charm and sense of one percenter comraderie.

      Or, that might be exactly the type of biker joint you’re thinking of.

      Edit: Actually, I think I just described the Woodman’s Inn, in the East end of Adelaide. I wonder if that place is still there?

      Edit edit: Or the New Century, on the other side of town. Now that I think about it there were a lot of places like that.