Electronic Catan LCD Tiles | Hacker News Reader

Electronic Catan LCD Tiles

coliniuliano.ca

529 pointsjsnell59 comments

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

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!

I've seen some quite decent low poly Catan models. You can do quite a lot with primitives.

There are a lot of cc-0 low poly models that would work well for this on itch io and other sites.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I suppose he has the file used to print the PCB which is “kind” of schematic-like.

“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.

As someone with no experience in that field, why is that? Is a PCB file too low-level and would be like posting assembly/executable code instead of the source of a program?

In a simple system the PCB is enough to figure it out, even if you have to deduce what each soldered component was.l - like a simple soduku.

A large complex CAD or PCB system will have thousands of pieces and parts and it would take much longer to work out which each actually was. A PCB doesn’t tell you what is soldered on the holes (though sometimes it’ll have R23 telling you it was the 23rd resistor, but not the values, etc).

I forgot that it was even possible to draw a PCB without starting from a schematic.

I guess it's probably somehow possible with the tools I use, but I always thought of it as something only done with some crazy ancient app that doesn't even do schematics.

I'm always jealous of people who can polish and finish a complex project like this. Amazing work.

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. :)

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.

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.

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

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?

Because you could have various different board shapes. The board game comes with various extensions that change the board shape and structure.

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.

But then the overall shape is defined by the size of the screen. Especially with Settlers, the actual game board is often a function of “how many tiles we got” and “how big is our table “.

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.

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.

They don't have to be if you strictly play the standard, 4 person variant.

I'm guessing this person hopes to eventually support other variants - which take significantly varying shapes.

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.

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.

Are there any large table top LCD products available for board games?

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?

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”.

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

Using it purely to display the static board surface would be pretty neat, though. You could scale it up larger, have decorative animations, etc.

If you really wanted to make it a statement piece, you could integrate a 3D printer and a card printer, and have it produce physical game pieces and cards on demand.

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.

There seem to be quite a few models of 55"+ 4K touchscreen available (for thousands of dollars), so I think that product type is still available. It's the middle sizes that are missing; I've been waiting for years to upgrade my 24" 1080p Dell touchscreen to 32" 4K or similar, and if that existed for less than say double the 24" price I'd probably buy several.

There’s plenty of table top arcade machines around. Eg https://arcadedirect.co.uk/table-top-arcade-machines/

It's super annoying when people don't mention the names of the products used and where they sourced them.

This is extremely cool, and great writeup as well! I really enjoyed learning about how the protocol works.

Would love to see a video about it, no matter the quality.

Interesting project. I'm intrigued about the possibility of using animations or state changes as part of game play. It looks like the idea is static display for this project.

Maybe there's a new game tucked into this project. Maybe not exactly Catan, but something that takes advantage of dynamic displays, mesh networks, and solid, simple game play.

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?

"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.

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.

Value is based on the combination of two 6-side dice. This creates a "bell" curve between 2 and 12 with 7 being the statistically most common dice value. 4 and 10 are considered mid-tier values.

6 and 8 can't be adjacent. Everything else is ok.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/7bituv/can_numbers_t...

"High" refers to probably of roll, which is highest for 6 and 8 (after 7, which serves a different purpose).

Love Catan and love the concept of position aware board tiles even more (sounds very future).

...not sure it would improve the experience though? The classic cardboard version works fine and arguably benefits from family moment away from tech

Very impressive project nonetheless - far beyond what I could do

Somewhat related: has anyone found round LCDs that don't have a giant side tab where the wiring connects? I've been wanting to build a round device, but using these screens always necessitates a giant bezel to cover the non-round part.

I can't point you toward a specific part, but I think something like this must exist for the 3rd gen Moto 360 to exist. I wouldn't be surprised if it was substantially more expensive than the ones with the tab, though.

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.

Someone please sell me this.

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?)

I really doubt it happening today or in a years' time. There's digital implementations of games but they don't have the same feeling as playing the game by hand. I'd pick up a card or draw something from a drawstring bag 1000 times for every 1 time I'd tap and drag a card or drag a token from a bag on a screen, and I'd think that's a pretty popular opinion.

I think a mixture of both would be cool, like augmenting card games by placing the cards on a surface that has a screen or an overhead projector, but you're right in that a large part of playing a board game is the physicality of it.

Sigh, with Google glass I thought AR was finally going to become a thing, but there still aren't any lightweight/slim AR glasses that are readily available.

This is awesome! I really wanted something like this for Battle Tech.

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.

SparkFun has some great tutorials to get you started. Read through their intro to embedded electronics: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/category/1

Does he describe why he built this? Catan tiles are determined at the start of the game and AFAIK don't change.

Would love to see a fully animated augmented reality version of Settlers of Catan instead.

Fantastic!

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