Retro-style Miniature Sports Scoreboard - RGB LED Matrix and Raspberry Pi Provide In-Game Updates

This Cornell University graduate describes how he built a miniature, retrostyle scoreboard that pulls and displays live college and professional sports scores from the ESPN API-bringing the excitement of being at a sporting event to your living room. Pre-game information, in-game scores, and post-game results are displayed on a built-in PiTFT touchscreen.

- Tyler Bisk

This project emulates a scoreboard by using a Raspberry Pi connected to a 64x32 LED Matrix. Using the touchscreen of a PiTFT, the user can select a team to display from collegiate and professional hockey, football, and basketball. The user can also select rotation between teams instead of displaying only one team. The system then queries the ESPN API to get live scores from the Internet according to the user's settings. Finally, the team names, logos, and scores are displayed on the LED matrix. The scoreboard displays a celebration whenever a team scores in football or hockey.

When the selected team is not currently in a live game, the scoreboard displays the results of the previous game or the date, time, and opponent in the next game, depending on which is closer in time. Using cron, a command-line utility for scheduling jobs, the service starts on automatically on boot and defaults to displaying any supported sport and team.

HARDWARE DESIGN

The hardware consists of three major components: a Raspberry Pi 4, a touchscreen PITFT, and a 64x32 LED Matrix. The Raspberry Pi contains a 16GB SD Card with the default Raspberry Pi Linux installed. As shown in Figure 1, The LED Matrix gets 5V of power from the included DC adapter, the PiTFT gets power from the Raspberry Pi, and the Raspberry Pi gets 3.3V from the included USB-C cable. The LED Matrix gets wired to the Raspberry Pi's GPIOs, according to Table 1 and Figure 2, while the PiTFT header is designed to simply snap onto the top of the Raspberry Pi [1]. LED Matrix pins are numbered left to right, and top to bottom.

SOFTWARE DESIGN