Okay, this is the funkiest custom paint job I have ever seen. This place must have some legendary girls volleyball team.
I don't need twelve name panels, just six for volleyball and five for basketball.
The hardware in Hong Kong doesn't really excite me, but this appears to be a 5 km race... involving San Diego State and USD??? I didn't hear about that.
What really makes my jaw drop is this: Transparent. Fucking. Shot clocks. LED digits in a clear polycarbonate housing. They have no photos, only drawings for now. But I really want to see one of these, up close. How do they manage this without it looking like a rat warren of wire traces?
[Update 2/3/05 12:30pm] These were actually designed at the behest of the NBA. People with seats directly behind the baskets at just the wrong height couldn't see action at the other basket through the existing shot clocks. There's an MSNBC story about it. The photo in the story shows me that there's a PCB just big enough to hold each segment's LEDs. My next question is where did Daktronics hide the signal decoder/driver PCB? The one for their 2-digit shot clocks (no game clock) sits behind the display and isn't terribly large, maybe 4"x8", but I don't see where in that case you could hide it. Unless they totally redesigned it as something longer and narrower that can fit inside that black frame? But that's the 2-digit model. The 6-digit models have used the full-size driver boards (about 12"x16") in the past. Then again, this is the NBA, they have money. You could certainly design a smaller driver board (more expensive,) which wouldn't achieve the same economies of scale as their regular full-size driver (used in everything else they build) (even more expensive.) They're surely not selling for the same $1600/pair as the metal 2-digit set I installed last year at Poway.
There's a Fox article I found in the Google cache that describes how Daktronics stress-tests these things: "Their tests involved hurling basketballs at them from half court and shooting others from a cannon designed by students at South Dakota State University."
Now I want to see that cannon in action. :-)
