Retro hardware often looks fantastic, but we may find we no longer need it for its original function. [John Anderson] found that to be the case with some old Heathkit gear, and set about giving them a fun overhaul.

With the help of AVR microcontrollers, the devices have been repurposed into electronic dice towers for playing Dungeons & Dragons. A seed is generated based on the chip’s uptime, and supplied to a pseudorandom number generator that emulates dice rolls. The devices can be configured to roll a variety of dice, including the usual 6, 8, 10, and 20-sided varieties. Plus, they can be set to roll multiple dice at a time — useful when you’re rolling complicated spells and attacks in combat.

[John] has converted a variety of Heathkit devices, from Morse code trainers to digital multi-meters. They provide their beautiful cases and a great retro aesthetic, and we think they’d make fitting table decoration for retro cyberpunk tabletop games, too.

Creating your own electronic dice is a great way to get familiar with programming microcontrollers. Video after the break.

Is there a tabletop Fallout game?

Indeed. There are a couple

https://www.modiphius.net/en-us/pages/falloutrpg

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/fallout/

Never lose your dices when rolling too hard ever again

After reading some of the comments and your responses, I suggest implementing Lemire’s sublime algorithm: Fast Random Integer Generation in an Interval (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10941). It’s beautiful and fair. Later research has improved it slightly, but it doesn’t matter in this context.

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