Live NBA Scoreboard With Huge 7-segment Displays

[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]

14 thoughts on “Live NBA Scoreboard With Huge 7-segment Displays

  1. 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!

    1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

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