Bluetooth dartboard scoring device

So after doing a bit of "trading" on the darts markets over Xmas and the New Year, it looked like darts could be a fun game. After all, which other game actually requires you to leave the house and go down to the pub for a few hours? With the weather so rubbish in recent weeks, and with petanque (that's french boules to you) regularly being rained off, it seemed like a great idea!

A quick click around on Amazon and thirty quid later, and we've got a spanky new Winmau Blade4 dartboard and a set of Ted Hankey darts on next day delivery!

It didn't take long to get the board set up (in the hallway at Nerd Towers, so make sure you shout or give a whistle if you're coming out of the dining room!) and to get a couple of games played. There's nothing like hitting two fives and a nine to make you feel like you're actually there, at the Lakeside, competing in the WDO finals. Except...

...what would really make it complete would be a massive, comedy sized scoreboard.

We already had some 4" seven-segment LED displays knocking about. Surely it was just a case of hooking them up to a microcontroller and a MAX7219 driver chip and getting them to display 501?

Knowing nothing about the displayed, we did the usual - poke wires at the terminals until something happened! As it turned out, these displays have four LEDs per segment, not just one, so they actually require about 7.2V to get them to light up.

The process was simply a case of applying power to one of the pins, then grounding others, in turn, until a segment lit up. Because the LEDs are - by their very nature - diodes, it didn't matter if we accidentally put the power lead onto a ground pin; diodes don't let current flow the "wrong way" through them, so nothing happened. After a bit of poking about, we discovered that we had some common anode 7-segment displays.

Having checked the datasheet for the MAX7219 driver, we found it could indeed supply larger voltages than the 5v logic for the data. But these chips are designed to work with common cathode displays, not common anode.

We were going to have to come up with an alternative. Straight away, with anything to do with sinking lots of current, we were thinking about a transistor array. And, luckily, in our lucky bag of ICs, we've a load of ULN2803A chips. They're not just 8-way transistor arrays, but they're ideal for sinking up to 500mA of current - at higher voltages than the logic control signals. Perfect!

But each output requires its own input signal, to hold the output low (grounded).

That means with 3 lots of 8 segments, we'd need no less than 24 i/o pins. That's a lot of pins!

Of course, for a 18F4550 or other PIC with a 40-way package, it's not a problem. Those bad boys have pins to spare. But we've an abundance of 16F1829 chips here, which have a 20-pin count. So we thought that perhaps each ULN2803A current sink could have its own shift register, to allow us to activate as many segments as we liked 

So for each 7-segment display, we've now got a shift register, feeding it's outputs to the "input side" of a ULN2803A. The outputs of the transistor array are connected via 100ohm resistors to the cathodes of the segments.

(not shown in this photo are the resistors between the 7-segment cathods and the transistor array outputs - which is why the display is so bright, running at 9v!)

After a bit of quick etching, and drilling lots of holes with our little dremel...

.... we had a PCB ready for populating

(we may have an abudance of 595 shift registers and 2803A transistor arrays, but there's no point wasting them in case the circuit doesn't work - that's why we're still using through-hole components and sockets for fitting things to the PCB!)

The firmware was completed, allowing characters to be sent to each display, via ASCII. Since our bluetooth modules simply convert bluetooth to serial (at 57600bps) as long as we can correctly parse data over serial, there's no reason why they shouldn't work, parsing data sent from a smartphone app.

Here's an early video of displaying data over serial:

Now we're just waiting on a new bluetooth module (and a free afternoon) to finish the scoreboard and put it in pride of place, over the dartboard!