D&D Counter - a Beginner Tinkercad Project

In playing D&D I have too many dice, I have a good way of drawing maps, but one thing I'm missing are counters. I D&D you need to keep track of a million things, turns left in a status effect, turns left until you can use an ability, playing health, damage applied to a monster, heck it might even be nice to know how many things I need to keep track of, and so here I intend to show you an easy way to make your own counter that can count the exact amount of numbers you need and is easily and quickly made. Once finished my counter took 1hr 18mins to print, and so if next week I need another I can make one with the exact amount of sides I need, and after this instructable you can too.

Tinkercad (Free)

After creating a project in tinkercad the first step to creating your counter is deciding how many numbers you want it to count. I decided ten and so I went over to the polygon option, selected it and placed it and then used the drop down menu to give it 10 sides. I also added a bezel of 25 degrees to make it look how I wanted, but as is almost every step in this guide the bezel is optional.

Our design is supposed to spin on a peg which means its important to make both a hole and a peg. Here we are going to select the cylinder tool and use it to make a peg smaller than our polygon. I made it approximately half of the size of my polygon. Copy and paste this cylinder to use for the peg. Now we're going to resize the cylinder. Make it ~95% of your original cylider, if it is possible make it an increment of .5 or 1 that way it is easier to place (Ex. 9.5, 9, 8.5...) Now with both the peg and the hole made its best to group the hole so it looks like it will when finished. Click the polygon, and then shift click the peg and finally click the button that shows a square and a circle combined.

Next we're going to look at making a stand, we need something to hold the rod, but also be able to slide on the counter. to do this we are going to use the roof option to make a triangle like in the picture. Once done we are going to cut a square hold out of it so we have a base, a triangle that goes up and a peg sticking out. (refer to the picture for more exact placement. Now all that is left for the stand is to attach the circular peg

If like me your peg is a size that includes a .5 this step will be a little difficult. Move your peg as close to center on the triangle as possible, and if you have a size that does not include .5 you'll be done, however you'll quickly notice tinkercad does not like moving objects in less that 1mm steps. What you are going to do is move it 1mm and then click the textbox that comes up and type .5. Hopefully now the peg is easier to center. Once this is done group the two objects like we did to make a hole in your polygon.

To add numbers first we have to rotate the cylinder 90° next we can use the number tool to make perfect numbers, and position them where we want, and then like our pin, make them a hole. Group these and move onto the next number. To do the next number we have to rotate our polygon by a number of degrees determined by our size. This number can be calculated as 360/number of sides, so for me 360/10. Repeat this process for all your sides. (Tip: sometimes you have to wiggle the rotation thing around so that it will "unlock" and you can go down to 1 degree multiples instead of 5. If you need finer than this you can click the little textbox that shows your number of degrees and input your own value) Finally we will rotate this back upright by 90 degrees.

At this point you can 3D print, CNC, or order out from shapeways to have a fully functional counter. However now that you understand tinkercad better I would recommend customizing it. As you can see in the picture I used the scribble function to draw a little potion on mine to separate it from the other counters I plan to print out, maybe you want to put a little arrow indicating the number it is on or make several spinners on the same peg, the point of using tinkercad is all of these things are both possible and accessible, and I would encourage you to try making one.