Someone Made a DIY Fantasy Football Raspberry Pi-Powered Scoreboard

With Michael's scoreboard project, you can display your favorite Fantasy Football team score on a Raspberry Pi-powered RGB LED matrix. The project uses a 64x32 LED panel to display score data pulled from the Sleeper Fantasy Football platform.

There are four modes programmed into the scoreboard project:

Pre-Game

This mode displays you and your opponent's avatar along with their name. If your name is more than 12 characters long, it won't fit on the display.

Live Scoring Updates

This is where the fun happens! This mode will check online for score updates every 10 seconds between 8pm and 1am EST on Thursdays. The scores are displayed on the screen as the updates come through.

Post-Game

The board enters this mode once a game is complete. It will stay in this state for the rest of the week displaying the final results. The winner's score is highlighted in green while the loser's score has a shameful red glow.

Off-Season

When Fantasy Football is over for the season, the screen reads "OFF SEASON" in large letters. Michael put it best, "You should just turn it off and plan to be heartbroken again next year."

The Fantasy Football scoreboard uses the Sleeper platform to monitor scores. You will need an account set up through Sleeper to create your Fantasy Football draft.

The program created by Michael will pull data from Sleeper starting at 8pm EST on Thursdays. It will check for updates every 10 seconds and immediately update the results to the scoreboard. When the score for a team increases, the text changes to green. If a score goes down, the text turns red. If you get more than five points, the text color changes to gold. It stops checking for updates at 1am EST.

If you want to create one of your own—good news! Michael provided everything you need to get started, and we’re here to help too.

Scoreboard Hardware

This scoreboard uses the same construction method we used to create our NHL scoreboard. Check our Raspberry Pi scoreboard guide for a complete breakdown of the wiring and assembly process—or watch the video.

The program runs on Raspbian. Michael specifically recommends installing Raspbian lite. For help installing Raspbian, check out our Raspbian Buster installation guide.

Before installing the scoreboard program, make sure Raspbian is up to date and download python.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git python-pip

When that's done, you can install the program Michael created by cloning the repository in Github. Use the following commands to start the installation.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mikemountain/fantasy-football-scoreboard
cd fantasy-football-scoreboard/
sudo chmod +x install.sh
sudo ./install.sh

Once everything is installed, you'll need to update the config.json with your Sleeper account information.

Visit Michael's Fantasy Football Scoreboard page on Github for full details on how to add the account information and optimize your Fantasy Football scoreboard.

Congratulations! You're ready for football season.