Tabletop

adjective [ before noun ] /ˈteɪ.bəl.tɒp/ /ˈteɪ.bəl.tɒp/ ​ used to refer to board games, card games, and other physical games, rather than computer games: Dungeons and Dragons

Hi all,

One of my sons has a major interest in several of the old school fantasy games, and the modern based of them or course. You can think in line with games like : Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, Zombicide and so on.

Every week he plays several of those games with friends. And he has a rather large stock of additional gaming mat’s tokens, dice sets and so to make his life easier.
Recently he asked if we could have a look for a table in his room where he could lay down his gaming mat, add a glass plate on it and draw his excel based self made maps on it.
And at that moment I was just wondering if there was not a better solution to his request. Well maybe not better but something with a coolness factor.

So after some wondering on the wonderful world of the internet we found several really cool examples of people who actually used a large tv screen for projecting the maps on a table with all the fancy graphics included.
The downside of this is however… The costs. The size of the screen would be rather big to support all his needs.
So back to the drawing board. Then We came up with the option to make a sort of led based grid where we would be able to project the grid lines on some opaque screen give the effect of the cells in excel. Why excel.. Well basically because he draw all his custom maps in excel using simple cell colors. So once again looking on the internet to see what would be possible. We came more or less to the conclusion that the general idea sounded nice and simple but being able to light up the grid instead of the cell would mean a massive amount of led’s.. All combined you would need a nuclear reactor beside it to power it.. Not really an idea for in house fun and games.
So what else.. Well let’s see what we can do with indeed only the cell being lit up. Well the idea is nice but as he used several colors in excel to identify some of the parts of his maps it would need RGB support.
This however seemed from a power current perspective a much better solution. And as the excel grid line up perfectly it would be easy to just transfer them over.

So back to the web to see what is possible. Well… a lot… a whole lot of solutions. And after searching for several hours we came to the conclusion that the best way was to get a interactive low resolution RGB LED table. Why interactive.. Well just to ensure the table can also be used for other purposes and basically because we can.. 😀

So the goal will be to make a analogue, touch sensitive, low resolution, RGB LED screen which can be fitted in a table.

Goal has been set… Planning will start this week.. I’ll let you know how it goes.. But it will be something for the upcoming months hahaha.

 

Till then.

XIII

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