I've had this idea for a while now that I want to make the most kick a** Catan board with LEDs and the like. What I want to do is when a piece is placed on the board, an LED of the appropriate color will light up underneath it, but i don't know how to facilitate this.
I've looked into using RFID tags and a reader, but even wth the cheapest readers I can find (usually around $5 each) I would still need 54 of them (1 for each vertex) and the cost adds up real fast. There's got to be a better way.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can register when a piece is placed on the board, its color, and corresponding location? Ideally something that's not going to cost me hundreds of dollars.
That is pretty limiting budget for a development project. You are going to have to try many different configurations of different hardware and different software. What is a Catan board?
A settlement can be placed at any vertex on the board, denoted by the black dots in the image.
What I've been considering is using an RFID tag on each settlement and a corresponding RFID reader under each vertex to register when a piece is placed and where. The problem is I would need 54 RFID readers, which would be over $200 just for the readers.
