Revolution UC 2023

Reads and writes D&D character data to and from an RFID tag attached to a character minifigure. It also provides a dice roller for players of the game to use as an alternative to rolling physical dice. 

We connected an MFRC522 RFID reader/writer to a Raspberry Pi 3. All of the code was written in Python. Several libraries (Spidev, MFRC522, SimpleMFRC522) go into making the RFID reader/writer work, while we used the GUIzero library to build the user interface.

The example minifigures were laser-cut in the makerspace downstairs.

The Raspberry Pi libraries we found for the MFRC522 RFID reader/writer module would only read/write one 64-byte sector of the tag, of which 16 bytes are reserved, so we had to condense the character data into 48 characters (i.e. 48 ASCII characters) total.

Only one of us actually was familiar with playing D&D so there was a significant learning curve about the basics of the D&D game system for the others, and we ended up significantly simplifying several aspects of the game and making the system a proof of concept instead of a 100% fully functional game system. We believe we still managed to capture the barebones essence of what is needed to play a game though.

We also originally wanted resin 3D printed figures to attach the RFID tags too, but we ended up lasercutting 2D figures when we found out the makerspace had a 3-5 day turnaround time for resin prints.