Roll your negotiation skill, because this d20 is a hefty one. The Tweet is also below. We are charmed by [Greg Davill]’s twenty-sided LED contraption, but what do we call it? Is it a device? A sculpture? A die? Even though “d20” is right on his custom controller PCB, we don’t think this will grace the table at the next elf campaign since it is rather like taking a Rolls Royce to the grocery store. Our builder estimates the price tag at $350 USD and that includes twenty custom PCB light panels with their components, a controller board, one battery pack, and the 3D printed chassis that has to friction-fit the light faces.
Power and communication for all the panels rely on twenty ribbon cables daisy-chained throughout the printed scaffolding, which you can see in the picture above. [Greg] made a six-sided LED cube last year, and there are more details for it, but we suspect he learned his lesson about soldering thousands of lights by hand. There are one-hundred-twenty LEDs per panel, times twenty, that is over two-thousand blinkenlights. We don’t yet have specs on the controller, but last time he used a SAMD51 processor to support over three-thousand lights. We don’t know where he’ll go next, but we’re game if he wants to make a chandelier for Hackaday’s secret underground lair.
(Editor’s Note: If you were at Supercon last year, and you got to play with this thing in the flesh, it’s worth it!)
Just for fun I went through and quoted this up, if I wanted to try to sell these as completed units or kits.
In reasonable qty these are the prices:
Panel: $5.20 each Assembled.
Controller: $100
3d print $150Given you need 20 panels, that's $350 USD just in parts. 😬 https://t.co/eWlcdUzcwY
— Greg (@GregDavill) September 14, 2020
Thank you for the tip, [cyberlass].
$150 for what looks like an SLS printed part seems a bit steep. Of course, if you wanted to do a small run you could fill an SLS build and the piece price would go way down. Either way, very clean build and a neat project!
I might be wrong but how is that 3D print worth $100? Unless he got this professionally printed and had to pay for shipping and super expensive filament.
From twitter: “That’s based on the shapeways part I’ve used for the prototype. It has to be MJF-Nylon, resin would be too brittle, FDM can’t support the features I need.”
That’s what it is, he says in a twitter reply that it’s a special filament from Shapeways: https://twitter.com/GregDavill/status/1305300365336653824?s=20
May be cheaper to CNC that thing…
welcome to Shapeways :))
Everything about this is overkill. It would be fine if it was a one-off but mass producing overkill is bad business.
“Just for fun I went through and quoted this up”
there is no indication that this is anything but a one-off and that he only did the math as an exercise
An LED Disco Ball :)
“LED20”
Not really a D20.. And I don’t think its LED count is quite high enough to really give it numbers.. A very pretty object though.
Can one up you on “most expensive d20”
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/iy85vh/comment/g6danai?context=3
(D20 computer on Reddit)
Awesome!