Scoreboard Project: Exterior Design

I once made a joke that I should build a scoreboard to keep score of the pick-up basketball games that a few of my friends play since I would be more useful there than on the court. Eventually I began to feel that building a scoreboard could be a really interesting project because it would require more sophisticated designs than I had previously attempted.

That was all about 4 months ago and I have been thinking about this project off and on ever since. Today, I decided to post my vision for the exterior design that I put together in Google SketchUp. There is nothing really unique about the look of it – pretty much the same as any scoreboard anywhere. 

 Figure 1. 3D Picture of the Scoreboard Design

Figure 2. Front View of the Scoreboard

The one thing I did want to highlight is the use of LEDs. I am going to model the control scheme for this board based on the 7-segment display, which is basically a smaller version of the orange and blue numbers you can see in the picture. The drivers for these 7-segment displays typically use logic gates to decode binary inputs and drive the individual segments off and on. I will explain this more in a future post but for now I just wanted to put something out to compare to my final board design (assuming I ever actually implement this project). 

I will periodically post updates showing my progress, or lack thereof, building this scoreboard and discuss other topics in between. If I worked on this design constantly I would probably lose interest or do a poor job because I just wanted to get it done. I have found that when I work on several things at once and do little pieces at a time I ultimately see more through to the end. My goal is to highlight some of the considerations/problems that are important to the design process and hopefully learn some new stuff along the way.

Let me know what you think of the layout. Comments are always welcome!