Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with getting some live sports scores displayed in a, shall we say, unique way. I had this old, kinda broken digital picture frame lying around, and I thought, “What if I could turn that into a dedicated score ticker?” The Sugar Bowl was on, and I’m a big college football fan, so that became my target: “ESPN Flashing Sugar Bowl.”
First, I needed to get the frame working. This involved some serious duct tape and a prayer, not gonna lie. The power button was busted, so I had to hotwire it – don’t try this at home, kids! – by carefully connecting the wires directly. It sparked a little, but hey, it worked!
Next, I needed to figure out how to get the scores onto this thing. The frame only had a USB port for loading pictures, so I knew I couldn’t just connect it to the internet directly. My plan? Use my laptop to grab the score, turn it into an image, and then load that image onto a USB stick.
I used notepad to write the code. After several attempts of trial and error, I succeeded!
The Image Creation Struggle
My initial images came out pixelated, I tried many ways to improve them. I tried different formats. Nothing worked. I finally gave up and decided pixelated was fine, given the source material!
The final step was just physically moving the USB stick from my laptop to the picture frame. I set the frame to loop through the images, and… boom! There it was, the (slightly delayed, very pixelated) Sugar Bowl score, flashing proudly on my Frankenstein-ed digital picture frame.
It’s definitely not pretty, and it’s far from real-time, but it’s my janky score ticker. I felt like a mad scientist bringing this old tech back to life. A totally unnecessary, slightly ridiculous project, but hey, that’s half the fun, right? It now displays the score in all its glory.
