The small displays on the control box are not useful at all when playing the game. I finally focused on building the large four digit seven segment displays. It took two trips to Tap Plastics for the acrylic and three laser cutter sessions at Techshop this week to prep the parts for assembly.
I ended up building only one of the full displays due to time constraints, but it is working great.
The display was laser cut with three layers of .2″ ply and two layers of 1/4″ acrylic. The bottom layer is a flat backboard with holes for wires to enter and exit, holes for hanging, and a handle. The second layer has the LED strips (cut to 3 LED lengths) stuck to it with holes at the corners of each segment for the wires to tuck into. It also has continuation holes from the back for wire access, hanging, and the handle. The third wood layer is a mask to to account for the height of the LEDs before the acrylic layer, and also to keep light from leaking between segments. The next layer is black opaque acrylic with inlaid white translucent acrylic. These create a nice glow from the LEDs. The top layer is a smoked acrylic.
My original plan didn’t include the top acrylic layer, but the gluing of the inlaid white pieces below it was quite imperfect. Adding the smoke front gives it a very polished look and doesn’t cut the brightness perceptively. Thus the second trip to Tap Plastics.
Other than the B+W acrylic layer, this was a straight forward build. I cut a longer LED strip into three LED segments; the strips have peel-away sticky backs, so they went on easily; I just had to make sure they were in the right direction. To help with aligning them the LEDs Layer had the pattern burned onto it.
Still left to do: Make a frame to hold them all together. Currently I’m just using clamps.
Finally, I had to write a small library for the Arduino to drive my particular seven segment displays. It maps a number to the seven segments. My segments are ordered (from first LED to last) FABCDEG. I can send a number or hex value and an rgb color value to each scoreboard and it will display.