I have written a scoreboard my friends and I use while playing Ping Pong (table tennis to some) in my basement.  It is an excellent example of real-world geek engineering gone way too far.Problem: when BS’ing and playing Ping Pong, if we digress from the game for even a few seconds we forget the score.  This gets quite frustrating: its not like we’re playing for money or anything (yet but having to do all that silly math and such while trying to unwind is just a hassle.  We needed a simple way to keep score while not detracting from the game. 

So was born the Java based Ubuntu fueled techno-hack that is the PingPongScoreboard.  Basically its a simple Swing-based Java application that displays the current score of the game in big retro digital numbers.  The score is updated by the player pressing a conveniently located button on the end of the table to increment their score or reset before a new game.  The system even keeps track of the server and reminds the players when it is time to drink and switch server (an important house rule).

The “monitor” is projected on the wall using a computer projector I had laying around.  I bought this originally with the intent of doing customer presentations (never really happened) and showing movies when I didn’t have a real TV (which I do now).  Using the projector for this purpose makes me feel like I’m getting good use out of it again. Control was done by implementing the JInput Java API for joystick input.  I tore apart a cheap USB joystick and extended the buttons to reach each side of the table.  

I used Ubuntu for doing this project to:

•  Avoid the evil Microsoft empire
• Learn new skills
• Punish myself (sometimes Linux is like standing in the middle of an Anvil rainstorm)
• Integrate “geek factor”
• Get excellent performance out of old,  mothballed hardware

 Pics and source code coming soon!