by Ken Xu
Rechargeable battery powered electronic dice able to select 2~100 face die or formula, featured with game presets, roll history, etc.
Could not find the dice for your dice game? Lost one of the needed die? Annoyed at dice dropping off a table? Tired of summing up the value of several dice?
Then what you need is an U-DICE, one die to rule them all !
Thanks for Kickstarter and all the backers, with your help, we had successfully brought U-DICEto life one year ago. So far, we have received a lot of valuable suggestions from our community, and have been developing a much more powerful and user friendly version, so now comes U-DICE 2.
U-DICE 2 provides 13 normal dice with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10,12, 20, 24, 30, and 100 faces, plus a fudge dice with the value of -1, 0, 1.
There are 2 methods to select the dice for each roll : dice pick method and dice formula method.
You can pick up to 12 dice from the available dice list on the dice pick screen.
You can specify the dice with the following formula :
AdX x C + B
A is the number of dice to be rolled, X is the number of faces of each die, x denotes multiplication, C is a natural number, while B is a number to be added to the sum of the rolls (or subtracted from the sum of the rolls if the + sign is replaced by the – sign) .
A : 1 ~ 15
X : 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 24, 30, %, F
C : 1 ~ 20
+: + or –
B: 0 ~ 20
For example, “3d6×10+3” means “roll three 6-sided dice, add them together, multiply the result by 10, and then add 3.”
A preset is a notation of dice used for a dice roll.
There are 2 types of presets : Roll presets and Game presets.
Roll presets has up to 20 presets, each preset can be specified by either the dice pick or dice formula method.
Game presets is used for easily changing the roll preset during a game.
There are 4 game presets, each game preset has up to 6 presets which can be specified by the dice pick method, dice formula method, or direct selection from the roll presets.
When you select a game presets to play, you can easily press the right button to change to the next preset in that game presets, or long press the right button to popup the game presets and select one preset to roll.
If you directly select a preset from dice pick method, dice formula method, or from the roll presets, pressing the right button will have no action.
Before rolling the dice, you first need to select the specified preset with the following 4 methods:
* Dice pick
* Dice formula
* Roll presets
* Game presets
To roll the dice, just give U-DICE 2 a shake, it will begin the rolling animation on the screen for 1 second, then display the roll result.
The following is a typical roll result screen:
The dice roll result are displayed in 1, 2 or 3 rows according to the dice count selected to roll. The die faces are only displayed when there are different dice in one roll. Roll sum result is calculated based on the preset selected, whether through dice pick or dice formula.
Whether the d6 die is displayed with number or pips is controlled by its preference setting.
There are up to 12 roll history available for you to check. On the roll result screen, long press the left button to launch the roll history screen, press the right button for different roll history, press the left button again to exit the history screen.
Within the roll result screen, press the left button to launch the main menu, where you could directly make or select a preset to play, configure your settings, access tools and mini games.
Settings menu is used to configure the roll presets, game presets, and launch the preferences menu.
Preferences menu is used to modify your preferences, such as toggle the dips display of the d6 dice, change the tilt cursor moving speed, and the time to enter sleep mode.
Besides the 2 buttons on the face panel for your easy operation, U-DICE 2 uses a 3-axis accelerometer sensor for tilt input. You tilt the U-DICE left or right, forward or backward to move the cursor on the screen, or change the value of the focused item. The tilt cursor moving speed is adjustable by its preference setting.
The 3-axis accelerometer sensor is also used to catch the shake event when roll the dice or wake up from the sleep mode.
U-DICE 2 will automatically enter the sleep mode after 15 seconds (adjustable) without any action to save the battery. Give it a shake to wake it up with the previous roll result. Within 2 seconds, the roll action is disabled to lock the displayed roll result.
U-DICE 2 is powered with a 170mAh lithium-ion polymer battery which can be charged with a normal Micro USB cable.
U-DICE 2 is equipped with a powerful nrf51822 BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) chip which capable of OTA firmware update, so you can always get the latest version even after you receive your U-DICE.
There is 1 mini game (breakout) in the prototype version. More will be added in the future.
There is 1 tool (stopwatch) in the prototype version, more will be added in the future.
More features will be added in the future. Any suggestion of the current feature optimization and new features is highly welcome.
The prototype of U-DICE 2 is already fully functional. We had successfully fulfilled our previous U-DICE campaign on schedule one year ago, we are confident in this campaign as well. That to be said, there is always the possibility of delays due to things beyond our control at the manufacturer’s facility. We will keep you closely updated with the progress and work hard to ship U-DICE 2 to you on schedule.