Scoreboard

Scoreboard v2.x

Posted on 03 February 2012 - 15:05

This program is an upgrade of the scoreboard described in this project. This time I had more programming experience and I decided to write the program in C++ and use Qt for the GUI.

This new version also had his own music player (right image). Besides making the scoreboard independent of ITunes a few other problems were solved:

  • Quickly add Major Penalties.
  • Run penalties simultaneously.
  • Easily add personal penalties.
  • Ability to select Ice Hockey as game, which has longer but less periods.
  • Music as stated before.
    • Add/Delete songs to/from playlist.
    • Create/Open/Save playlists.
    • Enable/Disable repeat playlist.
    • Play/Pause/Forward/Backwards/Next/Previous songs.

Scoreboard v1.x

Posted on 03 February 2012 - 14:57

This program evolved from a problem we (Sportiek Spins) were experiencing during the games. The scoreboard was positioned is such a way that it was visible for the teams but not for the spectators. To fix this problem I created a scoreboard that we projected on the wall so everyone could see it. Since I didn't have any programming experience I wrote the program in Visual Basic, since that seemed to be the easiest way to create a program with a GUI.

This scoreboard was an improvement in several ways:

  • Since the score, time and current period are visible, people don't have to bother the game officials to ask.
  • The penalty times were visible, so the teams could see how long power play/penalty killing time they had left.
  • We didn't have to calculate the end time of the penalties anymore, because the scoreboard showed the time the penalty has left.

A while later, we started playing music during the important games, we had to ensure the music stopped once the time started and vice versa. To do this I integrated the program with an ITunes plugin. This gave us the opportunity to just run a playlist and once the time started/stopped the volume was set to 0/100 accordingly.