Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with something I’ve been eyeing for a while – making a digital scoreboard. You know, like the ones you see at sports games. I thought, “Why not give it a shot?” and titled it “scoreboard 808”. Seemed like a cool name, right?
First things first, I needed to figure out what I was going to use. I’ve got this old Raspberry Pi lying around, and I thought it would be perfect for this. So, I dusted it off and got it hooked up. Then, I needed a display. I had a spare monitor that I wasn’t using, so I connected that to the Pi. Now, we were cooking.
Next up, software. I decided to keep it simple and use Python because I’m pretty comfortable with it. I found this neat little library called “Pygame” that seemed like it would do the job for making graphics and handling inputs. I installed it on the Pi with a simple pip install pygame. No biggie.
With the software part sorted, I started coding. I wanted to make a basic scoreboard with two teams, their scores, and a timer. So, I sketched out a rough layout on a piece of paper. You know, just to get an idea of where everything would go on the screen. Then, I started writing the Python code.
- I used Pygame to create a window and draw some rectangles for the team names and scores.
- For the timer, I just used Python’s time module to keep track of the seconds.
- I made some functions to increase or decrease the scores and to start, stop, and reset the timer.
After some trial and error, and a few “Aha!” moments, I finally got it working. It was pretty basic, but it was a scoreboard! I could update the scores by pressing the up and down arrow keys, and the timer would run when I pressed the spacebar.
Feeling pretty proud of myself, I thought, “Let’s add some more features.” I added a way to change the team names at the start. Then, I thought it would be cool to have a buzzer sound when the timer hits zero. I found a free buzzer sound online, downloaded it, and added some code to play it using Pygame’s mixer module.
After a bit more tinkering, I had a scoreboard that I was pretty happy with. It wasn’t super fancy, but it had all the basic features I wanted. Plus, I learned a lot along the way. I mean, who knew making a scoreboard could be so much fun?
Improvements I added
I’m thinking of adding more stuff in the future. Maybe some animations, different colors, or even network capabilities so I could update it remotely. The possibilities are endless! But for now, I’m just happy I got it working. It’s a small project, but it was a fun one. And hey, maybe I’ll use it for our next game night. Who knows?
