Sep 23, 2015 | By Kira
Not your average six-sided toy, the D20, or twenty-sided die, is an icon of geek culture, frequently used in tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons. If you’re looking for a cool party prop and are up for a demanding, multi-day, electronics and 3D printing-loaded challenge, Phil Burgess from Adafruit Industries has uploaded instructions on how to make your very own jumbo 3D printed talking D20 with customizable audio files.
The shell is entirely 3D printed in two halves that require no support material and can be printed in less than two hours each. The electronic unit is composed of several breakout boards and components from Adafruit and runs on the Arduino platform. Additional parts required include thin plastic speakers, a triple-axis accelerometer, eight magnets to hold the halves together, glue, a 3D printer, and soldering iron, among others. The 3D printable files are available on Thingiverse, and software and audio files can be downloaded from Github.
The two 3D printed halves are held together by small but powerful magnets
As a fun twist on the classic game piece, each time you throw the D20, a deep, cartoon-book-villain voice announces the number you’ve landed on and throws in a cheeky comment depending on whether you scored high or low. This is accomplished thanks to Face Gravity Vectors, as Burgess explains: “after coming to rest the sensor measures its orientation. The sketch as a table of x, y, and z vectors for each of the 20 faces so it knows which face is up. It then pings the audio fx board to play an audio of the file its landed on, and to make things a little more interesting, it throws in an audio commentary.” The extra commentary is selected randomly, making it less repetitive and more fun to play with.
As for the building and assembly instructions, Adafruit warns that it’s not simply a question of ‘1-2-3-done’. Each step, from 3D printing to gluing the magnets and soldering the wires, requires evaluation, decision-making, and a whole lot of patients to let the pieces set and dry. It sounds as though the team went through a lot of painstaking trial and error to create this device, and you should expect to work on it for at least a couple of days, and should read through all of the steps so that you know what you’re up against.
Even then, however, the Talking D20 is purely intended for fun. The electronics inside aren’t 100% perfectly balanced, and is likely to perhaps favour certain numbers over others, meaning that it should definitely not be used in serious RPG games and tournaments. Still, it’s perfect for entertaining your friends and for those ‘executive decision making’ circumstances. For example, since the soundboard is completely customizable, Burgess suggests loading each of the 20 faces with the names of local lunch spots to avoid pointless arguments with co-workers over McDonald’s vs. Pizza Hut. Not a bad idea!
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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where can i purchase the internal components for the die?
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