November
2005, Issue 184
Large-Scale
Electronic Display
Although
Peter’s large BASIC Stamp 2-based electronic display
is intended for use in sporting venues, you can add
the same sort of electronic display technology to
projects of your own. Read on to learn how he designed
and coded the basic circuitry.
by
Peter Gibbs
When
it’s warm outside, outdoor sports such as soccer, baseball,
and football lure kids and parents to green pastures.
Perhaps now is the time you should build that scoreboard
for your kid’s little league or soccer field. Even if
your kids are into indoor sports, this project will
still fit the bill.
Scoreboards
display content to keep fans and players abreast of
a game’s progress. Such information is constantly displayed
during television broadcasts of games. You can usually
see the score and time, except during commercials, of
course. In stadiums, all of a game’s information isn’t
so readily available, but the basics are always on display.
Not so, however, at small ballparks and playing fields.
Sometimes a lone referee does double duty as the scorekeeper.
Economics
usually dictates the type of display used at a sports
venue. As opposed to the old display systems that featured
incandescent bulbs and moveable segments, modern systems
have super-bright, tricolor LEDs. Systems for large
stadiums (e.g., the Jumbotron) offer full-color instant
replay capability. Such power-hungry systems can cost
millions of dollars. Even small LED-based scoreboards
can cost thousands of dollars.
To
address this problem, I recently built a large scoreboard
for cricket matches played at a local playing field
(see Photo 1). The affordable system consists of 25
large seven-segment digits controlled by a microcontroller.
I can send commands to the board from a laptop via a
serial RS-232C port. Because cricket is a slower sport
than baseball, I have ample time to update the scoreboard.
High data rates were unnecessary.
|
(Click
here to enlarge)
|
Photo
1—I mounted the scoreboard on a concrete base. The
large clock, which is from a different project,
has 18² digits. I covered
the digits with Plexiglas. |
Even
if cricket isn’t your sport of choice, you can use this
article as the starting point for building a display
to suit your needs. The end result depends on your layout
and the software you use to drive the digits.
