Home

Welcome to the mlb-led-scoreboard wiki!

Bill of Materials (BOM)

Standard 32x32 Raspberry Pi 3 Build

Shortcut to Adafruit Part List

Shortcut to Amazon Idea List

1. Raspberry Pi 3

2. RGB LED Matrix Panel 32x32 (5mm Pitch)

3. Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT + RTC for Raspberry Pi - Mini Kit OR IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SOLDER: Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet

4. Brass M2.5 Standoffs for Pi HATs - Pack of 2

5. 8GB Class 10 SD/Micro SD Memory Card

6. 5V 4A (4000mA) switching power supply (x2, the board uses a lot of juice so it's recommended to have one for the board and one for the Pi)

7. Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo

Swap out LED Matrix Panel 32x32 with a 64x32 Panel

Build Instructions

1. Gather Materials
2. Follow Adafruit instructions for the LED RTC Pi HAT assembly. If you're using a Bonnet (no soldering!) you should just be able to plug the bonnet directly into the Pi's GPIO pins.
3. Assemble rest of hardware; use a HDMI cable, keyboard and mouse for easy access. "Headless" setup instructions might be posted later.
4. Prepare Raspberry Pi Operating System called "Raspbian"
   • Insert SD Card with Micro SD card into port suitable with your computer.
   • download etcher - helps to write Raspbian OS to Micro SD card
   • download raspbian OS
   • open etcher
   • select raspbian OS as image to be written to micro SD card
   • wait for operation to be over before ejecting card from computer
   • insert ejected micro sd card into raspberry pi's micro sd card port
5. Be sure to check hardware setup and that micro sd card is securely in Raspberry Pi port before powering up.
6. Follow Installation instructions in README
7. Experiment with repo options for best user experience

Helpful Tips:

• What's the difference in LED Pitch?

  • LED pitch is the size of the LEDs. Adafruit sells many different pitches per dimension type. A 6mm 64x32 is much bigger than a 4mm. If you're sitting close to your scoreboard (it's on your work desk for example), then you might consider getting a smaller pitch so the colors are nice and saturated up close. If you're wall-mounting it in your man-cave as some sick DIY furniture, a larger pitch may be what you want.

• Starting the scoreboard on startup

• Automatically restart the scoreboard every day

• Using iOS Shortcuts with the scoreboard

• Don't run a GUI on your Pi. It kills the performance needed to run the scoreboard. Once you've set up WiFi on your Pi, run it headless through SSH. Alternatively, you can set up your Pi entirely headless through SSH by creating a wpa_supplicant.conf text file when flashing the SD card, causing the Pi to automatically connect to WiFi when it boots for the first time.

  • Running your Pi headless

• INSTALL FREEZING: There is a known issue with the lxml dependency taking a very long time to install. This is especially noticeable on lower-memory models of Pi (reports of issues on Zero, 3A+). If you're affected by this issue, you can try using apt-get as an alternative installation method:

sudo apt-get install python-lxml