Future Development
Preface
During the weeks of the FabAcademy and my project development, I tried to design my scoreboard with a lot of features that seemed useful to me. Obviously what could be useful to me, could be not so useful to others and some may say that it's missing something essential.
The nature of the project is to be opensource and free to improve, so that anyone could add or remove features to it.
More than once, during the development I had a lot of small ideas to improve the mechanical/assembly design, but to actualize them, it would have meant to rebuild a lot of things. So I thought to summarize them here, as future development!
Moreover, I built a small remote controller, based on the wireless chip CC2500, and to try it and debug everything I created a small PCB without spending too much time on the actual design of the remote. As future development I would like to re-create the board layout to try to accomodate it in a kind of Wearable wrist-band, where the enclosure could be a silicone one, made with molding and casting techniques.
Mechanical and Assembly improvement
Even if the overall result and the assembly procedure is really simple and straightforward, I thought of some modification to improve the User Experience.
Since I'm an engineer, and as almost all engineers love symmetric figures and highly regular geometries ☺, I decided to place the DC jack connector in the bottom edge, in the center.
But after using the scoreboard a couple of times, I felt like that place is really uncomfortable to deal with, because in this way I couldn't lay the scoreboard vertically on a table so easily.
The solution is really simple: move the DC jack connector to one of the sides, overcoming my love for symmetric designs!!
The top cover diffuser is working really well to create a good uniform light out of the LEDs. But since it's made out of a really thin fabric, cutting it to size result in having the edges frayed and prone to loosing threads.
To overcome this problem I added some aluminum tape all over the edges (and this give a quite good finishing look) but the adhesive force of the tape is not so strong on the fabric, so after some time it could detach...
Remote Controller
Since the scoreboard should be used even by someone in the field, I made a remote controller, based on CC2500. I developed a prototype board to debug the software and the functionality. Now that it's working, I would like to create a version 2.0 of it, to accomodate it some kind of silicone wrist-band, to wear during practice.