NWSL Scoreboard Using Raspberry Pi

Published

October 8, 2025

Link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/axkent/nwsl-led-scoreboard

I was inspired by the mlb-led-scoreboard project to build a similar open-source project for the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). I started out with retrieving live data and tailoring it into a dataframe using R on my personal computer. However, I found installing/using R on my Raspberry Pi to be extraordinarily slow. Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI) were useful in converting my existing R code into Python, crafting scripts to auto-refresh data, and display data on an LED board.

This project was a great exercise for me to practice working in Python and get more comfortable with version control using Git. I was shy to share it, but it’s been getting positive attention on the NWSL subreddit and on GitHub, so I’m glad I did.

I’ll probably explore building similar projects for leagues (perhaps other soccer or baseball leagues, since there are already some repositories focused more popular leagues). One challenge with sports that depend on a running clock (most sports?) is that the clock on the LED board usually lags behind the live event. Ignoring the new pitch clock in Major League Baseball, the slower pace of baseball and its discrete events allow the LED board to stay more synced with the action (it’s even sometimes ahead of the TV broadcast).