In playing around with the scoreboard’s ability to be controlled by a computer or smartphone, I wrote a quick script that does a few different effects on the board. It’s strangely mesmerizing.

Today I spent most of the day laser cutting sheets of ABS plastic for some basic enclosures. It took about 3 hours last night and this morning to prepare the 4×8 sheets of 1/8″ thick plastic into pieces that were more »

I printed the first prototype accessory switch and assembled it recently. This one is for table tennis. The idea is to mount one under each side of the ping pong table, plug them into the accessory ports on the scoreboard, more »

Last night was the PCB assembly party, in which 20 units went from bare boards and components to assembled boards. Some crucial components were missing from the BOM so we weren’t able to call them complete, but that was my more »

A couple weeks ago I gave a presentation in which a venture capitalist, after hearing the presentation, asked to buy a unit. I still don’t have tooling done for the enclosure, so I had to design a new enclosure that more »

Last week my boards arrived. I immediately set about populating one to test. With ~200 LEDs, ~35 MOSFETs, ~70 resistors, and ~30 other components, that’s a lot of soldering of tiny surface mount parts. The first board worked great, and more »

The first revision using the full size PCB has arrived! This is a rough draft; an attempt to see what happens trying to produce the board at the full size. There will be at least one more revision to make more »

As of today, the first revision of the board (actually the third revision, but the first one at full scale) has been sent to the PCB fab house, and we should get the boards within a week. This is still more »

A couple days ago Google announced support for accessories attached to Android devices. These accessories are based on the Arduino platform. What does this mean for the scoreboard? It means that certain Android phones and tables can now be hooked more »