Today I’m gonna talk about something I messed around with recently – making a football quarter timeboard. It all started when I was watching a game and thought, “Hey, it would be cool to have a little gadget to keep track of the time in each quarter.”
So, I got this idea to build a timeboard. First, I needed to understand how football quarters work. Turns out, each quarter in professional and college football is 15 minutes long. High school games are a bit different, but I was mainly focusing on the pro games.
- I started by gathering some materials. I used an old circuit board I had lying around, some LED lights, and a few other bits and pieces.
- The first thing I did was to set up the power source. I wired it up to a small battery.
- Next, I worked on the display. I used the LED lights to create a simple digital clock.
- Then, I programmed a microcontroller to keep track of the 15-minute intervals.
- After that, I added buttons to start, stop, and reset the timer. Pretty basic stuff.
The tricky part
was getting the timing right. I had to make sure the clock would reset to 15 minutes at the start of each quarter. I spent a good amount of time tweaking the code and testing it out.
Finally, I put it all together. It wasn’t the prettiest thing, but it worked! I could start the timer at the beginning of each quarter, and it would count down from 15 minutes. When the quarter ended, I’d just hit the reset button, and it was ready for the next one.
I even took it to a friend’s place when we watched a game. It was a hit! Everyone thought it was a neat little gadget. Sure, it’s not something you’d buy in a store, but it was fun to make and it actually turned out to be pretty useful.
So, that’s my little adventure with making a football quarter timeboard. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot along the way. Plus, now I have a cool gadget to use during football season!
