Norlin
New Member
Hi All,
Not really any questions, just a little writeup on what I'm working on. Feedback or advice definitely welcome as I'm flying blind for the most part just looking stuff up through google when I run into problems.
Started working on a small project yesterday making my own electronic scoreboard. This came about because while playing volleyball, everyone asks me what the score is before every score. Sometimes I make mistakes and people argue for a bit over the score, so I figured it'd be pretty trivial to create an electronic display and then have a wireless "clicker" in my pocket to increment the score for each team.
For the clicker, I'm figuring on having 5 buttons:
Increment Left team score
Decrement Left team score
Increment Right team score
Decrement Right team score
Reset scoreboard (to 00:00)
For the scoreboard, I cut some shapes out of some foam board to put LEDs into to form digits, using as an example: Sparkfun's GPS clock https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/present.php?p=GPSClock-1
but doing so on a much smaller scale and with only 4 digits.
So far, I've written up code for the receiver/display microcontroller, using a PIC16F628A. I figured using infrared for communication would be easy, but don't want to have to aim at the scoreboard each time I update the score, would rather just keep the clicker in my pocket. So I figured I'd use an ASK KLP RF module (https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=7815). Would a different frequency or baud rate be recommended? They seem to be offered at 2400 and 4800 baud using 315MHz or 434MHz. Once I get the transmitter side programmed I guess I can do some real life testing to see what works best and figure out if I need antennas (easy for the receiver side, harder for the transmitter side due to size requirements needing to be small).
For the physical scoreboard, I have a bunch of cheap high intensity LEDs with a narrow viewing angle. Basically what I'm doing is cutting my digits into two seperate pieces of foamboard, putting a piece of tracing paper between the two and also on top of the top foamboard. The LEDs go under the bottom piece of tracing paper and the light seems to get diffused very nicely, don't see bright spots just a clean segment. (will have to post some pics when I'm home to explain this part better)
I'll try to post some pics of my progress or once I'm done.
Not really any questions, just a little writeup on what I'm working on. Feedback or advice definitely welcome as I'm flying blind for the most part just looking stuff up through google when I run into problems.
Started working on a small project yesterday making my own electronic scoreboard. This came about because while playing volleyball, everyone asks me what the score is before every score. Sometimes I make mistakes and people argue for a bit over the score, so I figured it'd be pretty trivial to create an electronic display and then have a wireless "clicker" in my pocket to increment the score for each team.
For the clicker, I'm figuring on having 5 buttons:
Increment Left team score
Decrement Left team score
Increment Right team score
Decrement Right team score
Reset scoreboard (to 00:00)
For the scoreboard, I cut some shapes out of some foam board to put LEDs into to form digits, using as an example: Sparkfun's GPS clock https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/present.php?p=GPSClock-1
but doing so on a much smaller scale and with only 4 digits.
So far, I've written up code for the receiver/display microcontroller, using a PIC16F628A. I figured using infrared for communication would be easy, but don't want to have to aim at the scoreboard each time I update the score, would rather just keep the clicker in my pocket. So I figured I'd use an ASK KLP RF module (https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=7815). Would a different frequency or baud rate be recommended? They seem to be offered at 2400 and 4800 baud using 315MHz or 434MHz. Once I get the transmitter side programmed I guess I can do some real life testing to see what works best and figure out if I need antennas (easy for the receiver side, harder for the transmitter side due to size requirements needing to be small).
For the physical scoreboard, I have a bunch of cheap high intensity LEDs with a narrow viewing angle. Basically what I'm doing is cutting my digits into two seperate pieces of foamboard, putting a piece of tracing paper between the two and also on top of the top foamboard. The LEDs go under the bottom piece of tracing paper and the light seems to get diffused very nicely, don't see bright spots just a clean segment. (will have to post some pics when I'm home to explain this part better)
I'll try to post some pics of my progress or once I'm done.