Building a wheel
How do I make a wheel?
Open the wheel and type into the editor beside it. Each row is one entry; Add a slice makes another; the arrows reorder them and the cross removes one. The wheel redraws as you type, so what is on screen is always what will be spun. There is no save step, because there is nothing to save to — see below.
Can I paste in a list of names?
Yes. Press Paste a list instead under the rows and the editor becomes a single box, one entry per line. Paste a class register, a spreadsheet column or a list of raffle tickets straight in and every line becomes a slice.
Past a hundred entries the rows are no longer offered at all, because a hundred separate text boxes is not something anyone would fill in one at a time. The list is available at any size, so you can paste four names into it if you prefer typing that way.
How many entries can a wheel have?
A thousand. That is not a limit the drawing hits — a canvas will draw a thousand slices without complaining, they are simply hairlines by then — it is the point where the editor can no longer tell you the truth about the odds. Shares are shown to one decimal place, and past roughly two thousand entries an equal share rounds to a number that is no longer correct. A thousand sits comfortably below that.
Can I make one entry more likely than another?
Yes. Every row has a percentage box beside the label. Type 50 into one and that entry takes half the circle; leave the rest blank and they divide what is left equally between them. Beside each row the editor shows the share the wheel will actually use, which is not always the number you typed — and the slice on screen changes size to match. That is the point. You can weight a wheel as heavily as you like here, but only in a way everyone watching can see.
What if my percentages do not add up to 100?
Nothing is guessed at silently. There are five cases and the editor tells you which one you are in, every time, by showing the resolved share beside each row:
- Nothing typed at all — every entry gets an equal share. This is the ordinary case and needs no thought.
- Some typed, adding to less than 100 — the entries you left blank split the remainder equally between them.
- Typed entries already adding to exactly 100 — the blank ones have nothing left to take, so they resolve to zero and are struck through and marked as excluded. They never quietly vanish from the wheel.
- Every entry typed, adding to less than 100 — they are scaled up proportionally to fill the circle, keeping their relative odds. The scaled figures are what is shown.
- More than 100 — an error, in as many words. The wheel will not spin and Present refuses to open until it is fixed, because there is no honest circle to draw.
Displayed percentages are rounded; the slice angles never are. A wheel of three equal entries draws three exact thirds and reports 33.3% each.
Why can I only type sixty characters?
Because the result is shown in full when the wheel lands, inside a circle, and sixty characters is what wraps onto two readable lines at any size the wheel is drawn at. It is a limit on what the editor accepts rather than on what can be shown: a longer label pasted into the link still displays whole, on more lines and smaller type, and the editor says so.
Running a draw
How do I spin it?
Press Spin, tap the wheel itself, or press the spacebar. All three do the same thing, and the spacebar is what makes present mode workable from the back of a room with a clicker.
Can I pick several winners without repeats?
Yes, and you do not have to decide beforehand. Every result appears with a Remove button on it: press it and that entry leaves the wheel before the next spin, ignore it and nothing changes. If you are drawing thirty names, the Remove automatically toggle presses it for you every time. The entries left behind widen to fill the circle, because their odds really have gone up and the wheel is not allowed to hide that.
Where do the winners go?
Into a list in the corner, in the order they were drawn, which stays on screen in present mode as well. For a raffle or a running order that list is the actual output — a room cannot hold eleven names read aloud, and the person running the draw should not have to. It fills up whether or not you are removing winners, since a wheel spun five times has produced five results either way. Press its heading to roll it up if you want the wheel alone.
How do I start the draw again?
Reset, in the head of the winners list. It puts every removed entry back and clears the results together, because they are two halves of the same progress through the wheel. It sits there rather than in the editor so that you can reach it mid-draw without leaving present mode, which is exactly when it is needed.
Can I put it on a projector or a big screen?
That is what Present is for. It fills the screen, drops the editor and everything else that is apparatus, and keeps only the wheel, the winners list and the two buttons that act on the draw. The spacebar spins, Escape leaves, and the cross in the corner leaves too, for touch screens with no Escape key. While it is open the screen is asked to stay awake, so the display does not sleep between spins.
Present mode never shows an error, a warning or a message of any kind. If something goes wrong it stays quiet — a wheel that renders imperfectly is survivable in front of a room, and a stack trace on a wall is not. That is also why Present refuses to open a wheel that failed to load or whose percentages are over 100: the refusal happens at the laptop, while there is still time to fix it.
Can I make the spin faster?
Turn on Quick spin and it lands in under half a second. It is meant for a long draw, where sitting through a four-second spin thirty times is a test of everyone's patience. If your system is set to reduce motion, the short spin is used automatically without you asking — the wheel still turns and still lands, so what happened is still legible, but nothing goes on long enough to be uncomfortable.
Does it make a noise?
No. Nothing on the site plays audio today. If ticking and a note at the reveal are added later they will be off until switched on, and the setting will stay on the machine it was set on rather than travelling in a shared link. A wheel that makes a noise nobody asked for, in a room of colleagues, is the exact embarrassment this tool is built to avoid.
Can I use it without a mouse?
The editor is reachable by tab throughout and the spacebar spins wherever you are not typing. When the wheel lands, the winning label is announced through a live region, so a screen reader reads out the result rather than the canvas it was drawn on.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The wheel is drawn to fit whatever space it is given, at your screen's real pixel density, so it is sharp on a phone and sharp on a monitor. Tap the wheel to spin it. Turning the phone sideways moves the controls beside the wheel rather than under it, which is the same layout a laptop gets.
Does it need JavaScript?
To spin, yes — the wheel is drawn and turned in your browser and there is no server to do it instead. Every page of prose on the site, this one included, reads perfectly well without it.
Odds and randomness
Is the wheel actually random?
It uses the browser's cryptographic random number generator — the same one a password manager draws on — rather than the ordinary one most sites use. The draw is a fraction carrying the full 53 bits a JavaScript number can hold, compared against each slice's share of the circle. There is no remainder folded back in, which is where this kind of code usually picks up a small bias towards the entries at the top of the list.
The winner is also chosen before the wheel starts turning, and the animation is then solved to land on it. Nothing is being simulated and read off at the end, so a slow frame or a laptop under load cannot nudge the result.
Can the wheel be rigged?
Not invisibly, which is the only kind of rigging that matters. You can weight a wheel however you like, and the slice grows or shrinks to match — so a wheel that has been leaned on looks like one. There is no setting anywhere that changes the odds while leaving the picture alone. A tool that offered one would be a rigging tool, and it is the single thing this site is built not to be.
What does "honest geometry" mean?
That the angle of a slice is always its probability. A one-in-five chance takes a fifth of the circle, at every list length, on every page here. It is worth stating because it is not universal: weighted wheels commonly draw every entry the same size and keep the odds somewhere else, and some cap how many entries are drawn at once and show a rotating window of them while the rest still compete off screen. Both leave the room watching a picture that is not the draw being run. Neither exists here.
How can I check the odds myself?
Build any wheel and press Test the odds under the editor. The fairness page runs that wheel up to a hundred thousand times in your own browser and charts where it landed against where the geometry said it should. Each simulated spin runs the whole sequence a real one does, including reading back which slice the pointer actually stopped over, so it tests the wheel rather than just the random number generator.
That page is also honest about what it cannot show: it runs the same code the wheel runs, so it cannot audit your browser's generator, and one perfectly fair run in twenty comes out looking unusual by chance.
The same name won three times. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. Streaks are what randomness looks like, and a run that felt wrong is usually well inside what chance produces — on a six-entry wheel, three spins in a row landing on the same name happens about once in every thirty-six sets of three. Human intuition about this is reliably poor, which is why the fairness page exists: it can run ten thousand spins in the time it takes to wonder.
Does the wheel remember what it drew last time?
No, and it must not. Every spin is independent unless you take the winner off the wheel yourself, which is what the Remove button is for. A wheel that quietly avoided recent winners would be reporting odds it was not running — the same fault as hiding a weight, arriving by a friendlier route.
Why do the slices get wider when I remove a winner?
Because the odds changed. Take one of five equal entries away and the other four are on one in four now, not one in five, and the circle says so. The remaining entries keep their proportions relative to each other; they just share out what the removed one was holding. Seeing the wheel change shape is the disclosure, not a side effect of it.
Colours and labels
Can I choose the slice colours?
Not in this version. Slices take colours from a fixed palette in order. The palette is chosen to stay legible across a room, on a bright panel and under a projector, and it deliberately does not rely on telling red from green — around one man in twelve of European ancestry cannot. Every slice carries its label regardless, so colour is never the only thing carrying meaning.
The one place colours are the content rather than the decoration is the colour picker, whose wheels ship with their own. Renaming any of its entries makes the wheel yours rather than the page's, and it takes the site palette instead.
Why is Yes not green and No not red?
Same reason. Red against green is the one pairing the palette will not carry, so the yes-or-no wheel is black and white — and every other pair would have been just as arbitrary. Its labels are also turned a quarter turn to run across the slices, because two labels half a circle apart cannot both read the right way up along the radius.
What happens with a lot of entries?
Labels shrink to fit their slice and are truncated once they hit the smallest readable size. Above about two dozen entries the wheel stops trying: it draws numbers on the slices and puts a numbered legend beside it, which is what a room can actually read. The full label always appears in full when the wheel lands, however many entries there are and however little of it fitted on the slice.
Can I add images or my own logo?
Not today. Pictures inside slices are the first thing that would make the wheel wait on a file it may not get, and a missing image on a screen in front of a room is exactly the failure present mode is designed to make impossible. It is worth doing carefully later rather than quickly now.
The project
Is TrueWedge free?
Yes, entirely, with no free tier above it and no adverts anywhere on the site. There is nothing to buy and nothing to dismiss.
Can I use it at work, or in a classroom?
Yes — a lesson, a stand-up, a raffle, a tournament draw, a livestream. No permission is needed and nothing has to be credited.
Why does it exist?
Because the picture on the screen ought to be the odds being run, and often is not. The about page is the longer version: what the tool is for, and the list of things it will never grow into.
Something is missing or looks wrong.
Quite possibly. The wheel spins, the odds are honest and the winner is revealed, but the colours and the layout are still provisional and will change. This page will grow as the questions arrive.