Embedded System Design - RF Scoreboard System

When watching his family play league tennis, our customer was annoyed by the small size of the scoreboards used. They were hard enough to read at night, but in the bright sun were almost unreadable. He formed a company that began development of a new type of outdoor scoreboard that could be manufactured at costs low enough for amateur sports organizations, but functional enough to be very appealing. It included high-brightness LEDs, the ability to run off of battery power, and scoreboard control using an RF remote. The early prototypes showed well, but nagging problems unaddressed by the original Chinese design team remained.

From Prototype to Production

To keep offshore design and bill-of-material costs as low as possible, many trade-offs were made on the prototype which were not acceptable to the North American marketplace in general and to the customer's specifications. To overcome these problems, Tier One made all of the following improvements:

Use of industry-standard encrypted and keyed RF technology
Enabling domestic production with a full transition from through-hole to surface mount components
Reduced the number of printed circuit board assemblies required from eight to five
Eliminated vulnerable discrete wire connections in favor of sturdier locking connectors
Dramatically improved the reliability of manual controls at the scoreboard
Greatly improved battery life of the sign, enabling a single battery charge to last for days of constant use
Greatly improved range and battery life of the handheld RF transmitter
Eliminated RF transmitter interference with automotive key fob locking systems
Enabled simple association of transmitters to signs, eliminating factory-only pairing

In just six weeks, Tier One designed and developed all required electronics and software for these design improvements, ending a lengthy and frustrating prototype phase for the customer.

Contact Tier One to learn how your project can benefit from our experience.

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