If you read the articles in our March-May 2005 issues on the Jaycar Sports Scoreboard project, you’ll know that even before we finished describing it, we were prompted to add netball scoring to its original basketball code capabilities. That was done simply by upgrading the controller firmware, so it would set the board up for netball in response to an extra setup code from the console (ie, no changes were required to the hardware of either the scoreboard or the console).

The Control Console has a new front panel label to re-assign some of the switch functions. Apart from that, it's unchanged.

Subsequently, as soon as the third article had been published, we started to get requests for even more features. The most common of these requests was for the addition of basketball "Fouls" displays – one for each of the two teams (and preferably each display having two digits for a count of 0-99). In the end, it became clear that we were going to have to upgrade the design to add this feature at the very least.

While we were at it, we decided to make a few other changes as well. In particular, the display brightness has been improved, while the firmware has been upgraded to provide improved timing accuracy. The wireless Control Console is virtually unchanged, though – only the front panel art has been changed, to re-label keys that have changed in function.

This means that if you have an existing control console, it can be used as is.