Getting real-time info from the internet

Mag748

I am working on an LED Matrix display project at the moment, and I am doing research into the different things that I can display. I am already going to cover the basics like time, temperature, simple messages from a computer, etc. One idea that was suggested by a friend who is interested in sports was a way to display scores of a game in progress, much like a score board you would find in the stadium/arena. This way my friend can flip the channel to something else and still see the score for the game he is watching.

In order to accomplish this, I would need some way to gather the current score from the internet in real-time. There are many websites that give this information, but I am not sure of the best way to do it. I was originally thinking some kind of RSS feed or something like that, but I don’t know of any that update instantaneously. Most are delayed, or only refresh every 15 minutes or so. Some websites have a flash based real-time score/play-by-play display on their website. It would be great if I could "scrape" the score from that somehow.

Does anyone have any idea who this could be done? I don't know much when it comes to networking/web development. I would imagine writing an app that ran on a PC, then beam the parsed info to the Display would be the easier solution. But if there is a way to do all that parsing directly from the internet, using a PINK or something, that could be an option too. Thanks, Marcus.

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Clive Wakeham

http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/nba-ticker-1

You could look at the yahoo widgets and check out how they get the information from RSS feeds.

Of course the widgets are in javascript but its a simple language to learn/modify.

Mag748

Good idea. The Yahoo Widget developer kit looks like it has a lot of helpful information, and I am starting with the Tutorial. It appears that with the Widget Converter tool, one can take any already made widget and look at its code. This is a good way to learn XML and JavaScript too.

Thanks,
Marcus

Chris Savage

This project sounds similar to the YBOX project. It was able to get real-time updates for weather, news, etc. and display that information using the Propeller Chip. You can find more information at the following website. Take care.

http://www.ladyada.net/make/ybox2/

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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering