Greetings, all.
I thought I might post some general ideas for the implementation of a "vintage/retro" model scoreboard project I'm working on, just to see if there might be glaring errors or suggestions in general.
First, this scoreboard is going to be a faithful, working reproduction of an mid-70's/early-80's era college stadium football (American football, that is) scoreboard, with a pretty standard home/visitor score, working countdown clock, and a space for current quarter, time outs left for each side, as well as down, yards to go, and "ball on" indicator.
The score and clock digits will be .8" yellow seven-segment LED's; all remaining digits will be .56" yellow seven-segment LED's. The score and clock will consist of four two-digit LED's; the others will be four single-digit LED's and two double-digit LED's, totalling 8 "large" digits and 8 "smaller" digits.
I plan to drive the LED's with a pair of daisy-chained MAX7219's; one for the smaller LED's, the other for the larger ones. With those drivers handling the multiplexing, the max draw should be at most 100-120mA for each bank of LED's being driven, with the whole schmear hosted on an Arduino Uno. I plan to wire up a bunch of momentary contact pushbuttons on a separate small console to control the digits through a script in the Uno. So far, that doesn't seem very complex or complicated.
The part I'm not yet sure about are the matrix regions I plan to build for the team name "badges" over their score sections. I plan to use 8 5x7 LED matrix displays in what would become 40x7 display region. I should be able to drive these with two MAX6953's (one per four matrix displays). Since I need two such badges, I'll need four total 6953's to drive 16 5x7 matrix displays.
My question is whether its realistic to put two MAX7219's and the four 6953's off a single Arduino. I'm confident the Uno could handle the two 7219's and the 16 LED's they will drive for the basic scorekeeping, but I'm not at all sure I could push the additional matrix drivers/displays on there as well. I've all-but resigned myself to a dedicated power supply; should I be looking at a second Uno to run the name badges? The intent for the badges is to do nothing more than statically display each team's name; no animation or graphic images; set it once and forget it.
I may well be overthinking this, and underestimating the Uno, but I thought it more wise to ask than wonder. Apologies if the question is dumb or the answer obvious to the rest of the world; just isn't to me
Thanks.