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Topic starter
2021-01-18 2:40 pm
Hello everybody.
This is an idea that has been kicking around in my head for about a year. I received an Arduino kit as a Christmas present and did it ever open up a whole new world of possibilities I had never even considered.
I eventually realized that I could use an Arduino to create the project I had been thinking about for so long.
I play Dungeons and Dragons twice a week. On Mondays I play with a local group of friends and on Wed I play in an online game. A big part of D&D is combat encounters where your party battles against the NPC enemies your DM throws at you. This involves every player and NPC taking their turn one after another. The encounter starts with each player "Rolling Initiative". Each player rolls a 20 sided dice and that number plus that players Initiative bonus gives them a final number and that determines who goes first and so on.
What I wanted to do is create something that would light up an LED to indicate who's turn it currently is and also give the DM a count of how many rounds have passed. I had originally planned on doing this with a two position numerical LED display but I soon realized it would be much easier to use an LCD display, and it would allow me to display more information. I could now in addition to counting how many rounds of combat have passed I could also have an indication for what turn it is.
So after watching many, many hour of YouTube videos, (BIG BIG thanks to Bill and others) I learned enough to create this.
Topic starter
2021-01-25 4:25 pm
Hello Sean,
It is not hardcoded because from session to session there may be a different number of NPC's or players being tracked for a particular combat session. Or an NPC or player might be killed off or added into combat at some point and that would also change the number of turns being tracked.
It is setup so that you cannot advance to another round until it is at least the second players or NPC's turn since you will not have a combat session with only one Player or NPC tracked.
The round button was added as a way to signify the current round of turns has completed and it returns the LED indicator to the first players turn for the start of the next round. I am currently building it with 15 LED's, which might be overkill but it is better than not having enough, and the LED's are not very expensive. After building a couple of these I should be pretty good at soldering.
I have three DM's so far that want one so hopefully I will be able to start cranking them out soon. Hope to eventually get a 3D printer so I can make custom enclosures.
Sean451 reacted