[Kianoosh] was in Las Vegas over spring break and was fascinated by the real-time sports scores displayed at the casinos. He figured that this would be an easy enough project to duplicate, so he built a gigantic NBA scoreboard that updates live from the NBA website.
The build uses the OS X Automator to pull scores down from the NBA’s mobile site. Sending this through a parser written in Java, the scores are then sent to an ATMega32 over an XBee. [Kianoosh] posted all the code and schematics, as well as a PDF writeup. Because the scoreboard is sport-agnostic, [Kianoosh] plans on writing new code for the NFL, MLB, and NHL. We’re really impressed with this build, and with the giant 7-segment LEDs, this would be a great addition to a sports bar (or really any bar).
[Kianoosh] recorded a video of his scoreboard in action (from April 13, 2011 in case you were wondering). Check it out below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5VDC8qn8Gc&w=470]
this is awesome. looks like a real sports scoreboard, and i see you “solved” the issue with triple digits scores :) lol
Excellent work!
Since when did MBA qualify as a sport…did you mean to say MLB??? Cool build though;)
Love the giant 7-segments!
If he can make the computer end simple and straightforward, or eliminate it entirely (maybe with a custom website that delivers the parsed information) he could easily sell them!
thanks for checking out my project. Yeah the best way (if I were to sell it) would have a dedicated server the scoreboards can read from. This would eliminate the needs for firmware updates. However it makes the system more complicated because it needs to connect to a network, certainly possible.
Ahhh. Thanks Hacksaw.
I wish I could remember what was going through my mind when I wrote that – must have been interesting.
I really like the large display and the live feed but think its a little let down by the tripple digit implementation. I recently built a large temp/humidity/clock display for out factory using 6″ 7segs from sparkfun. I needed to make my own “:” symbol for the clock and found using leds, with the diffuser taken from a broken old monitor and then carefully painted neat black circles, to leave a perfect circular diffused spot for each dot of the “:” worked really well. I’m just thinking perhaps he could do something similar with this, but a strip of leds, diffuser material and paint the diffuser to look like a numeral 1
Nice! (Also, good job forestalling five thousand comments asking “how do i got led?” And thanks for the link — I believe I’ve got me a clock to build. :)
Great job, one remark however: Why just 2 digits for the score? It could go up over a 100!
Will that work with other sports or just one sector of one sport?
Genius!
I’m impressed that Kianoosh used Automator for the data grabbing.
Like a number of Apple programs, it seems to have been rolled out in a semi-prototypical form as a very promising tool, only to be left completely untouched since release, condemned to be a partially functioning gimmick. It does have its uses, though, and this hack shows that it deserves a lot more attention from Cupertino.
This would be absolutely perfect for a home bar. Congrats man, this is a HAD that I would actually buy.
Great, awesome.