Outcome

Overview

Have you ever had to miss watching your favorite team play due to work or a prior engagement? Do you want a way to keep tabs on the game without dedicating hours to watching it on TV or being interrupted by constant score updates?

The Score Ring is a device that allows the user to quickly check the progress of his or her favorite team during games without being distracted by in-game alerts or the droning of commentators and commercials. By connecting to ESPN, it links you to your favorite teams and reports changes in their game’s score through an LED ring display. The object is not meant to present a distraction; therefore, it does not report the scores directly— it displays the proportionate scores of your team and your opponent, to provide you a glanceable indication of how the game is going.

Process

Data: Our team used If This Then That triggers and actions to gather the necessary data. Luckily, IFTTT supplies a trigger through ESPN that fires every time there is an in-game score change for whichever team you specify. When the trigger fires, it sends score data to an event in the Spark Cloud. The device subscribes to this device and updates the display.

Hardware: Working with the Neopixel ring posed a few new challenges to the team. The Neopixel ring was fairly easy to connect to the Spark as we just needed to connect it to power, ground and an input. A 470 ohm resistor was placed between the Spark Core and the the data input for the Neopixel ring and a 1000 uF capacitor was placed between the 5V power and ground. These components were placed in the circuit in order to protect the LEDs in the ring from voltage spikes and high current, respectively. Once the Neopixel ring was connected, the team concentrated on writing the proper code to control the LEDs correctly. In order to show the score ratio of the user’s favorite team to its opponent, a colorWipe was used to turn the proportion of the ring for the score of the user’s team red and the remainder to white.

Bill of Materials

1 - Neopixel Ring - 24 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED w/ Integrated Drivers

1 - 1000 uF 16V Capacitor

1 - 470 ohm Resistor

1 - Spark Core

Fritzing Diagram

Future Work

This ambient scoreboard could be applied to a number of different contexts outside of the office. Larger versions could be developed and displayed in sports bars, especially team-specific sports bars where everyone is following the same team. Households could hang a larger version in their TV room to reflect their family’s team allegiances.

Ideally, this product could also be applied to non-sports related tracking for people who may not be interested in sports. This would tap into a new market sector and provide a greater profit potential. It could display poll results during political elections to show the change in both candidates’ favorability of winning the final election. It could also ambiently show spending habits by tracking and displaying the user’s ratio of money spent to money saved.

And… for the ultimate sports fan, the future version of this device would be able to display multiple game results at one time, perhaps through multiple variable-sized rings.