A pocket dice roller with a rotary knob and a 3D-printed shell

Difficulty

Intermediate

AI-buildability

4/5

The firmware is an Arduino sketch with common libraries that AI tools can write easily, and the hands-on work is light soldering and printing a case from provided files.

Time

A weekend

Cost

$25–45

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Forget the phone. no_DICE is a handheld with one clickable rotary encoder and a 0.96-inch 128x64 OLED that rolls D4 through D100, flips an animated coin, and tracks life totals from -999 to 9999. Turn the knob to pick a die, press to throw it. The coin flips two to four times before landing, so you can't read the result off the first frame.

The firmware runs on a Seeed XIAO RP2040 with the Grove Shield for XIAO, which handles power management for a 3.7V LiPo. The menu is built with the GEM library and drawn with U8g2, and KeyDetector turns the encoder into a proper input device. The random seed mixes noise from an analog pin, the RP2040's temperature sensor and battery voltage. Battery monitoring needs a voltage divider made from two 100k resistors soldered to the shield.

The whole thing is free and open source, and the enclosure is 3D-printed from provided STL files, with Fusion (.f3d) and STEP files for editing. If you want a weekend project that also doubles as a 3D-printing exercise, this is a clean one. The sketch is also a usable reference for GEM menus, and the frame can house a different board entirely."