WiFi LED NHL Scoreboard powered by a Raspberry Pi

Today I’ll show you how to make your own LED scoreboard for any NHL team

This project is made possible by using this GitHub repository https://github.com/riffnshred/nhl-led-scoreboard

What you will need:

• A Raspberry Pi 3A, 3B or 4
• A MicroSD card 8GB or larger
• A 64×32 LED matrix board
• Either the Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT or the Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet (I’m using the bonnet)
• 5V 4A (4000mA) switching power supply

Assemble the Hardware

Setting up the software

While I’ve been using this awhile now, there is now 2 ways to flash your MicroSD card:

1. Flash using using the official nhl-led-scoreboard GitHub image located here.
2. Flash your MicroSD card using an official Raspberry Pi image and manually installing the nhl-led-scoreboard software.

Either way flash your MicroSD card using Raspberry Pi Imager which can be downloaded from here.

Once your card is flashed you may want to edit the image to connect to your WiFi automatically on first boot or you will need an ethernet cable and plug the Pi into your network to configure. A good guide for configuring WiFi for a headless install can be found here.

Once your Pi has booted and connected to your network you will have to ssh to your Pi to start configuring it.

When your finally connected to your Pi via SSH lets set the Time Zone

sudo raspi-config

Update your Raspberry Pi

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

After all of your software is updated lets REBOOT

sudo reboot

Once your Pi has rebooted and logged back in via SSH we’ll need to install git

sudo apt install git

Now let’s clone the GitHub repository and install the software

git clone --recursive https://github.com/riffnshred/nhl-led-scoreboard
cd nhl-led-scoreboard/
chmod +x scripts/install.sh
./scripts/install.sh

Configure nhl-led-scoreboard

./nhl_setup

Now lets run it!

sudo python3 src/main.py --led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat --led-brightness=60 --led-slowdown-gpio=2