Yes and no. On the face of it I'm just a guy who loves dice. I love gaming and I've wanted to create a unique dice for more than a decade. I've designed literally hundreds of mechanical and electronic dice, but this is the first concept that I thought had the right mix of awesome styling AND utility.

That said, I do have a background in hardware engineering and design. I've run a successful consumer electronics Kickstarter campaign before and professionally I've been designing electromechanical systems for spaceflight applications for more than 20 years. Revolution Dice is a passion project and I am committed to making it a success.

Nope. Revolution Dice operate entirely on their own and can be configured for each roll with nothing more than the built-in buttons on the side of the die. By default the dice come loaded with the standard 7-die DND set and you only need a PC/phone if you want to change the font, graphics, or the types of dice loaded.

This was an intentional choice, as I've never liked to split my attention with a dice rolling or control app.

Yes. The processor generates a roll after the die lands using an internal random number generator. While users can customize a die's faces and art, it is not possible to bias or weight the randomization function.

Some people remain concerned that electronic dice are not truly random because, after some billions of rolls, industry standard pseudorandom functions may generate repeat sequences. However in the case of Revolution Dice, the processor's random number generator is seeded by hardware entropy sources - timer data from the moment of the roll plus noise from the accelerometers and gyroscopes - making it impossible in practice to predict or influence the outcome.

Yep.

You have access to an online configuration tool that lets you configure the types of dice loaded and the graphics used. You can also draw new graphics using the online sprite editor.

There are two different ways to define the die graphics:

• Fonts: Selecting a font means that the processor will compute a dice roll and then display the result numerically in the chosen font. If you're rolling multiple dice, the processor will calculate the sum and display it numerically as well. Font dice are convenient when you don't want to have to draw graphics for each face individually or want to roll many dice at once.
• Faces: Alternatively you can draw individual sprites for each face - in that case the processor will display the sprite corresponding to the numerical result. Sprites are useful for dice with symbols, non-numerical faces, or for nonlinear numerical dice.

Yes. And also maybe.

By default you can configure the scrolling speed and direction of the text or sprite. This gives a nice animated effect to the display if desired.

In addition it is technically possible to create animated sprites - that is, a sequence of images that are displayed in order. My original prototypes all displayed these types of animations and it worked well and looked awesome... but I'm on the fence as to whether this is a feature that I'll develop for the initial release. The main drawback is that animated sprites take up a lot of memory that has certain technical tradeoffs. It's something I'm still thinking about.

Any motion will do. The die has a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope which can detect when it is being moved, so you can throw it, roll it, shake it, or just tap it on the table.

Virtually silent. The sound is softer than a cell phone on vibration mode: a very soft buzzing sound that is not audible above normal room noise or speaking volume.

While each dice is individually balanced to ensure the rotation is smooth and silent, all styles of dice also incorporate foam padding so that they don't rattle or vibrate on a hard table.

To be perfectly honest I'm particularly proud of this part of the design. There are no gears used in the drive mechanism because any amount of gear noise was unacceptable to me.

Each Revolution Die consists of two parts - an exterior housing/frame and an interior rotating assembly. The exterior housing can be swapped out easily by hand, and we will offer a variety of (TBD) styles and colors to choose from or to 3D print yourself. The interior rotating assembly contains all electrical components, including the battery - it is not intended to be modified.

We will also release CAD files which describe the interfaces between the components so that you can design your own exterior housings.

Ugh, the LEAST fun part of this whole project has been trying to take good pictures or videos of persistence of vision displays!

The display is actually very bright and crisp in person, but like all POV displays, the dice rely on your eyes' natural persistence of vision to blend the rapidly changing pixels into a single stable image. It can be difficult to capture this faithfully on camera.

The solution is to use a VERY long exposure time which can make the video blurry and very sensitive to vibration and getting whited-out, etc. Its a balancing act that caused me much frustration.

Trust me though that in person the display looks amazing and is perfectly legible.