12/03/2025
I finally finished up a set of my "Dragon Heart Dice"! I've been working on these for somewhere between half a year and a year (with MANY failed attempts); so let me regale the curious ears with a bit of lore about them.
The dice have inductors and LED's in them, so that when they're in range of the dice tray they glow from within, (the tray has a copper coil inside of its walls that powers the dice remotely).
This took a lot of attempts to get right. There is technically math you can do to figure out: how thick the wire needs to be, how many coils, how wide the coils should be, how much voltage/amperage should run through the coils, etc., etc., and all of the same questions for the mini coils inside of the dice themselves. I took a bit to try to calculate it out, and understand what I was doing; but ultimately I fell back on good Ole reliable: trial and error. 😆
Once I figured out the coils and all that to get the level of brightness I wanted at the right level of range (they have about 6in of range), I also had to figure out how to squeeze enough electronics inside of the dice themselves. I took a few attempts at this as well, the biggest difficulty being the wires of the leds: if they were too long, they'd be too large to fit inside of the die; but if they were too small, I couldn't solder the ends without the opposite end de-soldering/burning the tiny bulb. I finally got to where I could squeeze in 3 inductors (one for each axis of direction, so that at least one is always in optimal orientation for energy transfer).
I got the scales by disrupting the curing of a thin layer of nail polish with some soap suds; and then I brush on some alcohol and dust in mica powder. It's hard to see the level of detail through a picture, but these scales took many attempts to get the intensity and color down just right.
There's so much more I could tell you about this project, but I am running out of space. If you want to see more about them, check out my video coming soon to YouTube where I go through the whole process (minus most of the mistakes), and I'll also be giving this set away for free to one lucky person! Watch all about it in my next video!
