Digital dice roller
Let's see what we're doing
“The internet” is awash with cheap electronics components. If you know what you’re looking for, of course. And I’ve already had experience of working with some tiny little LCD screens but had a real time finding them. Until I stumbled upon the correct search term – “oled spi” and “oled i2c” (I forgot they’re oled, not LCD).
These little things are brilliant for displaying small amounts of data (I used to use them to display the IP address of internet-connected cameras) and, thanks to the user-friendly Arduino libraries, are really easy to interface with.
Using just two wires (plus power and ground) and the Adafruit_SSD1306.h library, it took just ten minutes to get some custom text to appear on the LCD screen.
And then not really that much longer to embed my own bitmap code, to create pretty pictures too…
And just like that, all the pieces were suddenly in place for creating a tap-to-active dice roller.
I could create the bitmaps I wanted, I could get them to display where I liked on the screen, and I had a tap-to-trigger input system that I could use to tell the device when I wanted another number selecting.
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