Alright, so the other day I was super hyped to catch the Sixers game. I really wanted to know the score, like, live. So, I figured I’d try to build something myself to keep track.
First, I thought about where I could even get the score. I mean, sure, I could just keep refreshing a sports website, but where’s the fun in that? Plus, I wanted to play around a bit. I remembered there are probably some free sports APIs out there, so I started poking around.
Finding the Data
I spent a good chunk of time just Googling around. Honestly, it was a bit of a mess. Lots of sites claimed to have free APIs, but they were either super complicated or just didn’t work. I almost gave up, seriously.
Eventually, though, I stumbled upon something that seemed promising. It was simple, and it looked like it had the live scores I needed. No promises, though, because I’ve been burned before.
Building the Thing
Okay, so I had a potential data source. Next, I needed something to actually show me the score. I just whipped up a super basic display, nothing fancy. I wanted to see it on the computer.
The real work was connecting the data to the display. This is where things got a little tricky. I had to figure out how to grab the data from the API, and how to get what I needed(the score). I messed around with it for a while, lots of trial and error, let me tell you.
- First, the script grabs the game data.
- Then, it looks for the Sixers’ score and the other team’s score.
- Finally shows up in my display.
The Result (Sort Of)
After a bunch of tinkering, I finally got something working! It wasn’t perfect, by any means. It would sometimes lag a bit, and occasionally it would just…stop. But hey, it mostly worked! I could see the Sixers score updating, which was pretty cool.
It’s definitely not something I’d show off, it’s super rough. But, it was a fun little project, and I learned a bit along the way. Maybe one day I’ll polish it up, but for now, it’s my janky little score tracker, and I’m kind of proud of it.
