Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Everything Else => Topic started by: Necro on February 15, 2017, 02:28:42 pm
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I've been tracking this (Fantasy Scoreboards, http://fantasyscoreboards.com/ (http://fantasyscoreboards.com/)) for awhile, but $350 is WAY out of my price range for something like this. Even the Bud 'goal light' seems a bit ridiculously priced for what it is (http://www.budredlights.com/ (http://www.budredlights.com/)).
Wondering if anyone's done something similar for the game room/home bar/etc. or know resources describing how to? I have an Arduino I could use for it, just need some guidance since I'm relatively "green" on that front. :)
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It's difficult to explain how to do because how you go about it would vary greatly depending upon the hardware you use to build it. Basically you set pins high or low to set the various scores, (you might need a library if you use 7-segment displays) make the Arduino show up as a serial device.... send data to it and update the I/O accordingly.
Clear as mud right?
That being said, large digits like that can be costly, so you may want to roll your own.
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Honestly, I felt like the actual display itself would be the easy part - I'm assuming there's some library that you could use for setting outputs based on a number or output text, then have it display on LEDs wired up behind painted plexi or similar. What really has me baffled is getting the scores, time, etc., and then parsing that out.
Which, all in all, was why I was hoping someone had done SOMETHING similar I could hack away at to get to do what I wanted. :)
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Do you mean you don't know how to pull scores off of sports websites ect, or do you mean you don't know how to parse data on the Arduino?
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...yes. :) If I had an example, I could figure it out I think but...honestly...totally fresh on this stuff. Arduino especially. :)
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Well you are going to have to write a pc app or find one that will work for you. I'm sure ESPN or one of those stations has an RSS feed and there are examples on how to parse RSS in virtually every language. You'll have to send the data via straight serial port writing or one of the internet protocols and again, you shouldn't have any problems finding examples of that. ON the Arduino end things are extremely simple. You put a Serial.begin(9600) at the beginning of your code and somewhere in your processing loop put a Serial.readStringUntil(',') to read any serial data until the first comma and perform a case statement on that first bit. When you are sending data to the Arduino send it separated by commas, like:
"digit0,0" to set the first digit to 0, ect. You can parse as many variables as you wish after the function name by just repeating the readstringuntil command.
I can't write it for you though because Arduino does things differently and if you want to learn you really need to figure out the bits and pieces yourself. I hope that helps you some.
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At first I laughed and now I want one.
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Howard - it definitely does and thank you for even going as far as you have! I was hoping someone had done it and I could learn from there, but you really helped in thinking about this as something totally new and I appreciate it. It's more than I expected and makes me want to learn how to do it now. :)
And see PBJ! It's a cool thing to have in your basement! Or mancave. If not $350. :)
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Isn't this what yotz had? I mean kinda anyway. I thought a person just downloaded a file or something. It has been a while.