From Giving Back with ReDI School to myscore.live
How teaching IoT, friendship and experimentation sparked the first prototype
How teaching, friendship and tennis led to our first connected scoreboard
Myscore.live did not start with a business plan.
It started with a classroom, a few Arduino boards, LoRaWAN gateways, plenty of cables — and a group of people curious enough to see what could be built with them.
Several years ago (2017) , my friend Massimo Santoli from Gimasi and I started running IoT labs with students at the ReDI School in Berlin. The idea was simple: share some of our professional experience and give newcomers the opportunity to experiment hands-on with IoT technologies.
We worked with Arduino, sensors, LoRaWAN and cloud platforms. The courses were practical, sometimes messy and always experimental. And after two semesters, those experiments unexpectedly crossed paths with another big part of my life: tennis.
As the father of twins who played tennis, I had spent a lot of time around clubs and tournaments. One problem kept coming up: the score was visible on the traditional mechanical scoreboard next to the court, but the moment you walked away, that information disappeared.
Parents wanted to know how their kids were doing. Tournament organizers wanted to know which matches were finishing. Players wanted to know when their next court might become available.
So Massimo and I asked a simple question:
Could we read the mechanical scoreboard automatically and send the score to the internet?
That became our first prototype.
We attached RFID readers to the scoring discs, connected them to an Arduino-based controller and used LoRaWAN to transmit the score remotely.
The result was not exactly a polished product. There were RFID readers, exposed electronics and a spectacular number of wires attached to a tennis scoreboard.
But it worked.
An entirely analogue scoreboard had become an IoT device — without changing the way players used it.
That prototype started a much longer journey. The RFID disappeared, the electronics evolved, connectivity improved and cloud software, live scoring and tournament management were added.
Eventually, the experiment became what is today myscore.live.
The technology has changed considerably, but the original idea has remained almost exactly the same:
Keep tennis simple on the court, while making the score available everywhere else.
And perhaps the best part of the story is how it began.
It came from teaching, friendship, giving something back and experimenting with technology — mixed with a personal passion for tennis.
Massimo and I certainly weren't expecting that a few semesters of IoT workshops would eventually lead us to build the first technical prototype of a future company.
Sometimes innovation starts with a carefully designed product roadmap.
And sometimes it starts with a group of people around a table, an Arduino, a LoRaWAN gateway, a tennis scoreboard…
…and far too many wires.
https://x.com/cschaale/status/918155659576856576?s=20
https://x.com/cschaale/status/884829230839803904?s=20
https://x.com/cschaale/status/877992983114772482?s=20
