For sports activities followers, nothing is best than seeing a favourite staff play from the stands. However few persons are fortunate sufficient to attend video games with any form of regularity. TV and radio present some compromise, however they actually do not make followers really feel like they’re truly within the stadium or enviornment. As their username makes clear, Redditor cardsfan527 is an enormous fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball staff (to not be confused with the Arizona Cardinals soccer staff). They constructed this desktop scoreboard to trace Cardinals video games in a means that feels extra genuine than simply checking the scores on an app or web site.
This scoreboard appears to be like just like what you’d see mounted subsequent to an older baseball diamond’s outfield, however on a scale sufficiently small to suit on a desk. It lists the rating for every inning for the house staff (which is at all times the Cardinals) and the away staff (which is at all times the opposing staff). Along with the scores, there are additionally numerical readouts for each groups itemizing runs, hits, and errors. There are additionally LED indicators for the present variety of balls, strikes, and outs. Lastly there’s a small diamond within the nook with an LED at every base that may illuminate if a participant is on that base.
The MLB very helpfully hosts an API that anybody can use to tug real-time scores for video games in progress. cardsfan527 used a Raspberry Pi 2 Mannequin B to run a script that gathers that information and updates the scoreboard. It shows the entire rating numbers on seven-segment shows, however these and the LED indicators required quite a lot of pins. So cardsfan527 designed customized PCBs with shift registers that daisy-chain collectively, so the Raspberry Pi might management the entire LEDs with its restricted variety of GPIO pins.
However cardsfan527 made two errors: the primary was choosing tiny SMD (Floor-Mount System) resistors, which had been extremely tough to solder by hand. The second mistake was selecting shift registers that weren’t optimized for 3.3V and failing to account for voltage drop throughout the daisy chain. That downside was simple to resolve by boosting the voltage output.
With the circuit working, cardsfan527 was in a position to construct the scoreboard. They laser-cut and engraved a chunk of plywood, then painted it. The engraving made it simple to color the graphics and textual content. Easy toes maintain the plywood up, so cardsfan527 can see the rating of a sport from anyplace close by.
