Derby Scoreboard Console

Here is a scoreboard console that J and I made a few years ago for the local roller derby team.

The derby team has a projector that they use to display a scoreboard during bouts. The scoreboard is a flash animation running on a laptop. The projection looks great, but sitting at a laptop updating it lacked the refined style that roller derby cultivates. We thought it would be great if they had a good-looking console to use for running the scoreboard.

We wanted a retro-80s look. The buttons are from an arcade supply store. The surface is fake oak-texture contact paper. The edging is plastic T-molding made for stand-up arcade games.

Here it is in use at a bout:


The laptop running the scoreboard is just to the left of the console in the photo. The other two laptops are for tracking statistics during play, so we didn't do much to make things look less nerdy overall.

The two dials at the top are rotary switches that send one of a set of keystrokes when the neighboring button is pushed. They are used to select different decorative elements and inter-titles on the scoreboard. The other buttons control the score count, the clock, the player lists, etc. The dial meter at the top right just looks good; it doesn't do anything.

Here's a shot of the console during construction, before it got dressed:


Despite its size and charming looks, the console is really just a keyboard hack: a set of buttons and switches connected to a PCB ripped out of a keyboard. When you push a key on a typical keyboard, it closes a circuit (or two), letting the keyboard's brain know what key you hit. If you replace that key with a big arcade button, it does the same thing the key used to do but it's more fun to push. The console plugs into the laptop just like a keyboard, and each button or switch causes a keystroke, which the Flash program interprets as a command.

Here is the inside; you can see the bottoms of the buttons coming through the face and the wiring to the keyboard PCB at the top. One benefit of the simplicity is that it has run for three years of rough use without a hiccup.


Thanks to J for the photos!