[HN Gopher] Electronic Catan LCD Tiles
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Electronic Catan LCD Tiles
Author : jsnell
Score : 429 points
Date : 2022-05-29 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (coliniuliano.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (coliniuliano.ca)
| emilfihlman wrote:
| It's super annoying when people don't mention the names of the
| products used and where they sourced them.
| rocauc wrote:
| fantastic build. it'd be neat to complement this with collecting
| in-game statistics on which resources were collected by which
| player to further evaluate performance. I have a hunch the best
| players not only get access to the most resources but have a high
| ratio of points generated per resource collected
| stavros wrote:
| This is extremely cool, and great writeup as well! I really
| enjoyed learning about how the protocol works.
| gotrythis wrote:
| Someone please sell me this.
| quartesixte wrote:
| Love it but:
|
| >There is no schematic for this project since there were very few
| components and it was easy enough to just draw a PCB.
|
| You should really draw one. As someone who works in hardware
| engineering, the amount of times this has come back to bite
| someone in the butt is immense.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suppose he has the file used to print the PCB which is "kind"
| of schematic-like.
| quartesixte wrote:
| "CAD is Master" is really famous last words of a lot of
| builds.
|
| But that being said, fair point. The PCB file is sufficient
| in this case.
| pukku_99 wrote:
| Hi
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm always jealous of people who can polish and finish a complex
| project like this. Amazing work.
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| I used to feel this way, but it really is a skill anyone can
| develop. I actually just finished building a replacement
| control board for a window fan to make it HomeKit-connected,
| which would have been beyond me in the past. The key is to
| break the project down into concrete, achievable phases. For
| example, my project required firmware to test the UI, drawing a
| schematic for each sub-component, building a BOM, drawing a
| schematic, drawing a PCB, building the board, writing firmware
| to test the board, testing the board, and then writing the
| final firmware. That's a long list, but each item in isolation
| is a couple of hours or days. Once you are able to decompose
| the project, it's just doing the next thing. Oh, and accepting
| that you'll need to fix mistakes in past steps along the way.
| :)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This is awesome! I really wanted something like this for Battle
| Tech.
| echelon wrote:
| This is really cool! I'd like to see something like this turned
| into a product that could support a wide variety of games.
|
| Programmable E-ink snapping hex tiles would be a game changer.
| I'd love to have support for hundreds of board games with
| negligible storage requirements and no more cheap cardboard.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This reminds me of a company called "Cheap-Ass Games" that
| sells $5 bare-minimum paper templates and rules for games that
| depend on the existence tokens and dice etc. "Kill Dr Lucky" is
| an awesome game (like Clue, except you try to commit the murder
| rather than solve it). Cheap-Ass Games' model seems a perfect
| match for high-tech modular boardgame hardware.
| farseer wrote:
| Are there any large table top LCD products available for board
| games?
| grishka wrote:
| I remember there being, at some point in the 00s, many projects
| with projectors shooting at a touch-enabled frosted glass
| tabletop from below. Those looked really cool and futuristic.
| That was when large LCD panels were prohibitively expensive,
| too, so they had no choice but to use a projector. Yet somehow,
| all these projects have disappeared despite all the advances in
| display technology. Why?
| bombcar wrote:
| I was following some of these back then and the main reason
| they died off is once you assume everyone has a phone you can
| do much of the work on the phone itself.
|
| And then the pieces/map itself isn't that complicated to do
| "for real".
| toast0 wrote:
| Well the Microsoft Surface had to be killed so they could
| reuse the name.
|
| Really though, I think it's a hard product to get good enough
| to sell. You'd need to do a lot of polishing, but it's going
| to be expensive and have low sales, so it's hard to recoup
| the r&d. And no matter how much you spend, I think you still
| end up with different visual impact of looking at a screen vs
| looking at a board on a table. I bet there's some really nice
| experiences possible though. Setup and cleanup would likely
| be way faster.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| It sounds cool, but probably not very viable product. I see
| several problems:
|
| * big, unwieldy, works only a centrepiece of a "game room"
| and there is a limited number of people interested and able
| to set up such room for themselves
|
| * lack of tactile feel - in general it would feel closer to
| an "electronic entertainment" than a board game
|
| * limit of a 2d field - there are many things that you will
| not be able to do easily - like drawing cards from a deck and
| showing them only to individual player
|
| * lack of content - board games are physical products with
| all the rights attached - you'd have to license each and
| every one of them before adapting for your specific brand of
| game table
| McNutty wrote:
| I don't know much about the game (have played a couple of times)
| but I'm curious about the author saying that two neighboring
| tiles can't both have a high value, going into detail about how
| to overcome that problem... and then one of the sample photos
| shows two 10s neighboring?
| kixiQu wrote:
| "high value" in this case isn't about the numeric value, but
| has to do with how often the number comes up on a pair of dice.
| Particularly, 6 and 8 are the most prized.
| yojo wrote:
| It has to do with the probability of a given die roll
| occurring. There are three ways to make a sum of ten with a
| pair of six sided dice:
|
| 6-4, 4-6 and 5-5
|
| There are five ways to make the sum of eight (ditto for a sum
| of six).
|
| 6-2, 2-6, 5-3, 3-5, 4-4
|
| So you are almost twice as likely to see an eight rolled as a
| ten. The game actually has little dots underneath each number
| showing how many possible die rolls produce that number (so an
| '8' has 5 dots underneath it, a '12' has just one).
|
| Seven is the most common roll, but it has a special meaning in
| the game and does not correspond to a resource hex.
|
| For balance reasons you don't want a settlement location to
| have a super high probability of producing resources. So you
| don't let '6' and '8' sit next to each other. Otherwise the
| player with the settlement spanning them would likely win
| easily.
| tengbretson wrote:
| I don't know the game that well, so I could be missing something,
| but if the board is a screen, why do the tiles need to be
| detachable at all?
| danielbln wrote:
| Because you could have various different board shapes. The
| board game comes with various extensions that change the board
| shape and structure.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I think they are suggesting that not just the tiles can be
| rendered, but also the shape of the board. You can have the
| edges around the board just be a dead zone, so it fits into a
| standard rectangular TV/monitor.
| [deleted]
| JohnDotAwesome wrote:
| I think it's less about the game mechanics and more about the
| viscerality. Board game players tend to prefer physical
| representations they can feel and fiddle with.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Exactly. Making the whole board a screen would take away from
| the experience. At that point you could just play one of the
| digital versions that exist.
| strangus wrote:
| Fantastic!
| chrisMyzel wrote:
| Would love to see a video about it, no matter the quality.
| contingencies wrote:
| Haha. Literally just finished a game with my family and was
| thinking "you know I should laser cut and engrave/mill some metal
| pieces because these move too much".
|
| For this project I would've had each board host an analog switch
| (neighbour selection) and use SPI and/or I2C rather than onewire.
| This would allow cheap flash memory (unique ID per tile + local
| storage/configuration) with SPI/I2C passthru. That way the host
| could determine topology easily and deduplicate redundant routes.
| A dumb read-only MCU could populate the local RGB from flash if
| required. With the spare cycles thus obtained you could even
| implement animation.
|
| So... who's got wood for my sheep?
| https://youtu.be/VBmRCclzCVU?t=33
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen people take a piece of wood and cut hexagonal spaces
| in it - with holes below to pop pieces back out.
|
| Things like this exist too:
| https://gamesenhanced.com/2014/10/04/custom-wooden-catan-gam...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I have been thinking about 3D printing some hex pieces out of
| PLA, embedding some small magnets in the periphery, and
| painting them...
|
| Unfortunately my modeling skills are much stronger with
| geometric primitives like cuboids, cylinders, and spheroids
| than with mountains, forests, pastures, clay quarries, and
| wheat fields!
| derac wrote:
| There are a lot of cc-0 low poly models that would work well
| for this on itch io and other sites.
| Taywee wrote:
| I've seen some quite decent low poly Catan models. You can do
| quite a lot with primitives.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I've found that even 6x2.5mm N38 magnets are more than strong
| enough to stick pieces thick of cardboard to a whiteboard.
|
| Larger ones could probably hold something even if there's a
| good few millimetres of wood between the magnet and the metal
| board.
|
| Dangerously powerful things. I use them to keep tiny screws
| in place when I disassemble something.
|
| Properly placed they can even stop laptop fans completely.
| Avamander wrote:
| They could just have tiny magnets in them to reduce the amount
| of misalignment. Though having a fancy laser-cut and etched set
| does sound nice.
| Xeronate wrote:
| How does one get into the hardware side of things to do stuff
| like this? I wouldn't know where to start with components, wiring
| things together, etc.
| beckerdo wrote:
| Imagine when the processor and materials become cheaper. You
| could have very large hex boards that support many game maps and
| pieces. With touch control, it would be fun have gestures to move
| and combat with the stacks of pieces.
| stcredzero wrote:
| With touchscreens becoming cheaper and screen viewing angles
| getting better, what are the prospects for board games to be
| subsumed by very large iPads? (Like a yard or a meter diagonal?)
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I did something like this in grad school once. The mechanical
| part of this is really hard! Getting things to line up reliably,
| repeatably... I don't think magnetic pogo pins were available
| when I was working on this though.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Are you sure the pins themselves make use of magnetism? It
| looks to me more like he embedded a pair of square magnets on
| each edge for alignment, just outside the outermost pins. Also:
|
| _While there are magnetic pogo pin connectors all over
| AliExpress, nothing really fit the bill for this project._
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(page generated 2022-05-29 23:00 UTC)