Super-simple die rolling firmware for the BBC micro:bit single board computer.
Once upon a time there was an odd little product called the Dragonbone, an electronic die roller built in the 80s. A number of people expressed a sense of nostalgia about the Dragonbone, and wished someone would start making them again.
I'm not going to do that.
What I can do is offer some quick and dirty software to make a BBC micro:bit fill the same roll as the Dragonbone without the 1983 LED interface. Instead we have a brand-spanking new 2022 LED interface! It's also a lot smaller, and not really bone shaped any more. With some creative license I'm going to call it scale shaped, though.
If you're familiar with the BBC micro:bit you can take the main.py file and build it into an apopropriate hex file for flashing on the micro:bit. Otherwise you're probably better off looking at the releases section and grabbing the latest pre-build hex file. Plugging you micro:bit into a computer brings up a drive that you can just copy the hex file to, in stalling the die rolling firmware.
So the micro:bit has a really simple interface with a matrix of LEDs flanked on either side by a button. Hitting the left button ("A") cycles through the available die sizes and displays the current die size scrolling across the LEDs. Be aware that the Dragonscale supports the entire Dungeon Crawl Classics dice chain, so there may be a couple in there you're not used to if you normally think of the standard set of 7 polyhedrals. The right button ("B") rolls the currently selected die size and scrolls the result across the LEDs. That's pretty much it. You can also shake the device to trigger a roll; it will display a "?" on the LEDs just so you know you've triggered a roll but will not start scrolling the result until you stop. During testing there were a couple times I really got in to shaking the board and by the time I stopped half my die result was already off the screen.
