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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

If you've ever had the pleasure of running a Daktronics scoreboard... Holy cow is there some bad UI there!

Looks like a 1970s military interface. With cards that you overlay on the controller for different sports, but the schools, etc.. lose the cards.

So many operations require strange & confusing sequences of button presses.

At least with basketball professional referees often understand the UI well and can help out in a pinch, but these things are really really hard for volunteers to figure out.

There are some newer ones that are self contained where the computer & scoreboard are integrated and sit on the desk with the scorers and timekeeper. Those have the lovely design that the horn/buzzer is right in the unit and it blows everyone's ears out when it goes off.

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For the last few years they have had a bluetooth controller and a companion phone app. The other beauty of these is they have a data out port that is able stream the data for other applications such as overlaying the score on a live broadcast. I know because I retrofitted a sports park a while back with steaming audio/video/scoreboard data. The people at Daktronics were super easy to work with and what a super fun project.

I only interact with these at ice rinks; they've all got laminated cheat sheets pasted to to score table; and the control box is fixed in place. not like in a high school gym where the control box has to come and go.

Our home rink was built in ~2000 and had a "high tech" system with a palm pilot driving the scoreboard. It got replaced by a computer running a java webserver and internet explorer maybe a decade ago. A lot more friendly for a novice, but the daktronic wired remote switch to start and stop the clock is a lot nicer than having to hit a small click target area. And I could see a skilled operator getting to the point where they could touch type the control box; gotta have eyes on the screen for the web based system (no hotkeys; or at least they're not known by the team parents)

If you're gonna go screen and keyboard might as well go the CLI route. So people could touch type.

You can still have the web based display and click targets, and have them send the commands to an in-browser terminal/command log. This allows people to learn the CLI while exploring the GUI.

Not sure if there are a lot of different producers in europe, but I know that it’s not much easier to use the boards in german gyms. Have seen a couple of them so far. The interesting thing happening here is that the boards stay in place but they get new interfaces to use them with smartphone apps.

I have been volun-told to keep score at a few youth baseball games on these. The first time I definitely fumbled around keeping the count straight - which was always quickly pointed out to me from the stands :)

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