Revised July 29, 2019
LX2160 Owner's Manual
www.electro-mech.com · 800.445.7846
Page 15
Managing Multiple Scoreboard Displays
The preceding material discussed how to run data cable for a single pair of shot clocks.
When multiple scoreboard displays are installed in the same facility, the options can
become confusing. Please discuss cabling plans with your Electro-Mech sales rep to
make certain you receive all the materials you need to meet your expectations. Since
shot clock displays are intended for use along with basketball scoreboards and (when
hard-wired) are typically connected via daisy chaining to the main scoreboards, the
following material focuses mostly on setting up data cables for the main scoreboards.
The simplest (and rarest) arrangement occurs when multiple scoreboards are
completely unrelated to each other. In this case, each display would have its own
control console (or consoles, in the case of scoreboards with stat panels) and its own
data cable.
Daisy-Chaining
Another simple case is when multiple displays are always run in synchronization from a
single control console. There are two ways to run cable for this setup. By running a
secondary data cable from the data output port of one cabinet to the data input port of
the second cabinet, you will link the two displays permanently.
This daisy-chaining technique can be extended, with a third display connected to the
second, a fourth display connected to the third, on so on. We recommend daisy-
chaining no more than ten displays from a single data source. Each scoreboard display
in the chain adds a few milliseconds of propagation delay. After the tenth display, this
delay would be noticeable when the Clock is counting Tenths of Seconds.
The second technique for running displays in synch is to use two runs of cable, each
patched to a separate output of the same control console. We recommend this
technique, when conditions in the gym allow it, because it offers the option of running
the scoreboards separately in the future. This is discussed further in the next section.
