Hi.

I do have a problem. Like some of you know (probably those who checked my profile), I play wheelchair basketball, in an official hobbyist league (the lowest one actually). No my (or better: our) problem is that we have to get a scoreboard (right word?) including playclock timer and a count-down timer (8/24seconds, stopable and resettable to a specific time). This is where our problem starts: There are many available on the market, with prices over 1500 Euro (about 1300US$?). Our club simply doesn't have that much money, heck, we couldn't afford them for 500Euro, if they ever got that "cheap". Now I thought about building the displays myself, using self-built battery (or remote) powered LED based 7 segment displays (about 30cm/12" high). No problem there, I am even still able to decode 4bit/position to display the correct number (but would of course use a pre-built decoder for that, those are cheap). The only problem that is left (aside from the program to control it) is the microcontroller I probably need to drive the total of 10 single number displays.
Now, is there anybody on this BBS who is capable of building such a controller circuit and also willing to do so? I would not need an actual circuit board, just the design (and probably the program for the controller plus some documentation on how to use it), and I can guarantee that I would not make any profit from this.
I would like to post all the info that is needed to build such a device on my web page once it is finished. But only if no programmer/boarddesigner involved is against this plan, the primary goal is to built the hardware for our club, everything else is a plus.

If anyone knows a source for completely built scoreboards and 8/24sec timer for less than 400$ total, I would be very interested in that as well.

cu,
sven