Hi.

I do have a problem. Like some of you know (probably those who checked my profile), I play wheelchair basketball, in an official hobbyist league (the lowest one actually). No my (or better: our) problem is that we have to get a scoreboard (right word?) including playclock timer and a count-down timer (8/24seconds, stopable and resettable to a specific time). This is where our problem starts: There are many available on the market, with prices over 1500 Euro (about 1300US$?). Our club simply doesn't have that much money, heck, we couldn't afford them for 500Euro, if they ever got that "cheap". Now I thought about building the displays myself, using self-built battery (or remote) powered LED based 7 segment displays (about 30cm/12" high). No problem there, I am even still able to decode 4bit/position to display the correct number (but would of course use a pre-built decoder for that, those are cheap). The only problem that is left (aside from the program to control it) is the microcontroller I probably need to drive the total of 10 single number displays.
Now, is there anybody on this BBS who is capable of building such a controller circuit and also willing to do so? I would not need an actual circuit board, just the design (and probably the program for the controller plus some documentation on how to use it), and I can guarantee that I would not make any profit from this.
I would like to post all the info that is needed to build such a device on my web page once it is finished. But only if no programmer/boarddesigner involved is against this plan, the primary goal is to built the hardware for our club, everything else is a plus.

If anyone knows a source for completely built scoreboards and 8/24sec timer for less than 400$ total, I would be very interested in that as well.

cu,
sven

What about those cheap little programmable LED signs like this one?

Some of them are serial-programmable. A club member with a laptop could operate it.

Dunno if those would be big enough for your purposes though. But they're certainly cheap.

Hi Tony.

Nice link, very interesting, but actually too expensive. See, we do need a display for the score and total playtime (resp. playtime left) including an indicator for the current quarter and two displays for the 8/24 second timer clock. That are a display of 2+2 (score) with 2+2 (playtime in minute+seconds) plus 1 (quarter characters (or 7 segment displays) and two displays with 2 characters each (those two displays must show the same). The scoreboard including the playtime display is positioned at the middle of the field while the two 24/8 second timer displays are positioned at opposing corners of the field. And there are rules about the minimum size of each number displayed (15cm/6" for the 24/8 second timer, about the same for the others). The only displays with the correct size I found were >1000$ each, if I would use those, we would spend more than on a commercially available system.

cu,
sven