Keeping up with your favorite (and least favorite) NFL teams is even easier this year with Lalder95’s Raspberry Pi Scoreboard wall art project. Combining a little Python script with a few LEDs, this Pi project makes it easy to see which football team is winning at a glance.
Calling it a scoreboard may be disingenuous. It is a board and it does show you score data, but not in raw numbers like you might expect. This project was designed using a wooden NFL wall art board from Hobby Lobby. Lalder95 added LEDs next to the logo of each team and programmed a Raspberry Pi to indicate a status for the team based on current score information retrieved online.
Since the primary method of notification is limited to LEDs in this project, Lalder95 used a variety of colors and modes to express different status details. One mode will flash blue lights to indicate opponents for matches at a given time. The second mode will flicker LEDs to show which games are actively in progress. Different colors also show whether or not a game is upcoming, who is losing, or if two teams are tied.
The LEDs were primarily driven by Python and controlled using a Raspberry Pi 4 but there’s no reason a smaller module like a Raspberry Pi Zero couldn’t be used in its place. Node-Red was implemented to help retrieve score data for the NFL teams. Some of the best Raspberry Pi projects are automated and this one works with Home Assistant to control things like brightness or whether or not the NFL board is even powered on.
If you’re feeling inspired for this football season, visit the original thread at Reddit to take a closer look at this clever scoreboard project.
