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The finishing touches

A project log for Risk Battle Simulator

Love Risk, but hate constant dice rolling? With this device, there is no more inevitable dice falling off tables and knocking around armies.

scott-clandininScott Clandinin 07/29/2016 at 19:060 Comments

My button caps arrived and I was finally ready to finish off the project and make a video for it.

The hardware implementation was a bit rushed and not totally thought-out. This can be seen by the lack of symmetry in where I drilled in the button holes. I must have shifted things when I was tracing on the stencil I made. Thing don't line up as I imagined.

If I were to make it again, the first thing I would do is use a circular rocker switch rather than a rectangular one. I only really had a drill and dremel tool at my disposal, so cutting out the hole for the switch was a real hack job. I ended up covering the sides of the switch with electrical tape to hide the horrible cut. With a step bit and a drill however, it's easy to cut out the perfect hole every time, and that would have improved the aesthetics.

A future revision of the device could see the battery pack held inside the case itself to shrink the size. But that would require better planning and actual PCB with surface mount components and tighter cable routing.

Despite it's minor flaws, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and look forward to trying it out in a real game of Risk.

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