Track NFL Games with This LED Board!
Lucas Alder's Raspberry Pi-powered, game-tracking display lights up to show how each team is doing.
If you follow the National Football League, you were just treated to a rather gripping Super Bowl finale. However, for all but the LA Rams, there’s always next year. To help keep track of what teams are playing in 2022, you could construct a team tracker like the one shown here.
As reported by Raspberry Pi, Lucas Alder came across a wooden board emblazoned with team logs, and decided to enhance it with a Raspberry Pi. LED lighting is installed beside each team logo, which changes color depending on the team’s status. In one mode, lights flash blue to signify who is playing who. In a second mode, teams with upcoming games are shown in purple, with blinking lights used to indicate games-in progress. In this mode, how each team is doing is indicated by green for winning/won, red for losing/lost, and yellow for tied/tie, and the blinking actually speeds up in the fourth quarter and overtime.
Alder is using a Raspberry Pi 4 for control, along with Node-RED to collect game data. While he freely admits that the Pi 4’s processing power is a bit overkill here, he had one available, so why not? The setup is integrated with Home Assistant, allowing him to control brightness, refresh rate, and even an update delay — important to prevent spoilers due to the broadcast potentially lagging behind.