diy casino corner with 3d printed roulette and nanoleaf

so, i had this idea to create a mini casino corner at home — just for fun, to play with friends. i thought it would be cool to combine a 3d printed roulette wheel with nanoleaf panels to make the whole thing look more like a real casino. the plan was simple:

• design and print a small roulette wheel (something around 12-15 cm diameter).
• sync nanoleaf lights to react during the game — for example, flashing red if the ball lands on red, green for 0, etc.
• create some atmospheric lighting modes — soft golden glow for "casino vibes" and more dynamic effects when someone wins big.

but the whole thing didn’t exactly go as planned. first, my 3d printed roulette wheel was a disaster. i went way too detailed with the design (pockets, ball track, numbers) and printed it too small. my ender 3 pro (0.4 mm nozzle, pla, 0.2 layer height) just couldn’t handle it — instead of a roulette wheel, i got something closer to abstract art made from molten plastic.

the second problem — the lighting sync. nanoleaf has cool integrations, but there’s no "roulette mode" out of the box. i started playing around with home assistant and tried to hack together some automation, but i’m not great with coding. i also realized that just having lights flash red or black isn’t as cool as i imagined — it felt too… predictable? like it wasn’t really capturing the atmosphere i wanted.

for inspiration, i had been browsing a lot of online casino sites, especially this one. the reviews and ideas there gave me some good visual concepts, but of course online casinos mostly show graphics — it’s hard to really capture the feel of a physical table from that alone.

now i’m wondering — has anyone here tried doing something like this? like combining nanoleaf with some kind of physical game setup (not just video games)? and do you have any advice for getting smoother lighting transitions or more creative effects? also, if anyone here has experience with functional 3d printed mechanisms, i’d love to hear how you make sure they actually work smoothly after printing.

that’s a pretty unique project! i’ve seen people sync nanoleaf with pc games, music, and movies — but not with something physical like a roulette wheel. just curious, why did you go so small with the print? 12 cm for a roulette wheel sounds really tiny — was it just to fit the space, or were you trying to keep print time short?

yeah, i wanted to fit everything on a small table, plus i thought smaller would print faster and save material. but i didn’t realize just how much detail would get lost at that scale. the numbers were basically unreadable, and the ball track ended up rough no matter how much i sanded it.

makes sense — small prints with lots of fine details are tough, especially on fdm printers. maybe a resin printer would’ve handled it better? or you could split the model into parts and go bigger, then assemble it after printing.

i actually thought about resin, but my printer’s fdm and i didn’t want to invest in a resin setup just for this. splitting the model could work though — maybe i could print the wheel in sections, like pizza slices, then glue them together. have you ever tried that for mechanical parts? does the alignment stay accurate?

yeah, i’ve done that for some bigger projects. if you design the joints well (like using dovetails or alignment pins), you can get decent precision. it’s not perfect, but definitely better than trying to print super fine details all in one shot.

good tip! and what about the lighting part — have you ever done any custom automations with nanoleaf? i kinda want to move past just "red for red, black for black" and do something more creative, but i’m not sure what’s actually possible without coding skills.

home assistant is probably your best bet if you want advanced stuff, but it’s not exactly beginner-friendly. if you want something easier, you could use ifttt — like linking nanoleaf to a simple button or sensor near the wheel, so it triggers effects when you spin or drop the ball.

that’s a cool idea — i could probably hide a sensor under the wheel’s base. i’ll check ifttt, thanks!