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Dicebot rolls the dice for you, tweets a photo back

Are you feeling lucky? Then try out Dicebot, a combination of a robot and a Twitter account that remotely rolls a real pair of dice.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser

Dicebot results
My first two rolls with the Dicebot. Intridea

We've seen a host of Twitter-controlled gadgets over the years. There was the live cockroach and the tweet-activated paintball gun. Now meet Dicebot, a robot you command by tweeting the hashtag #RollTheDice to @IntrideaDiceBot.

First, you'll get a notification that Dicebot is about to roll for you. Then, you get a tweeted link to a photo of your results. My first rolls generated a six and a three. Dicebot comes from Intridea, an online and mobile application developer. What makes this so entertaining is knowing there's a robot far away actually rolling a pair of real dice. This is much more fun than just using a software random-number generator.

There's actually quite a bit going on beneath the surface of the Dicebot. The bot itself was built by modifying a dice game from the 1920s. The original game had a manual spinner that was used to tumble the dice inside a round holder. Intridea added a motor to the spinner and set it up with a Raspberry Pi controller.

A custom program reads the pips on the device to give the correct number to Twitter users. Custom scripts are used to automatically queue up and process tweeted requests.

Dicebot can take the place of a random-number generator. It can also be harnessed for dice games or role-playing affairs, so long as two six-sided dice are all you need. When I tried it out, my answers came up very quickly, so it shouldn't slow down your castle raids too much.