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Here is an interesting story on Daktronics and SDSU from an Ohio perspective. Highlights from the Akron Beacon Journal:
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/12858023.htm
Clock tower puts Beacon in new light
$500,000 project does more than give time, temperature
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
The term ``Beacon Journal clock tower'' has just become obsolete.
This time, you're getting a lot more than a clock. This thing is a scoreboard. Or maybe a video game. We're not exactly sure yet.
We can flash it, blink it or stream it. We can roll it, scroll it or hold it. We can change the colors. We can even give you full-color animation.
Yes, you'll still get the time and temperature, just as you have for the last 66 years. But our new $500,000 tower will also provide news, advertisements, event information and whatever else our mad programmers dream up.
The lower display consists of a four-sided message board, each side 12 feet wide and 3 ˝ feet high. That's where the news and ads will go.
The upper screens, 7 feet by 3 ˝ feet, will alternate between the time and temp, ``Akron Beacon Journal'' and the logo of the newspaper's Internet partner, Ohio.com.
Forget the neon lights that went up in 1939 and the gaudier ones that went up in 1955. Forget the floodlights that went up in 1966. Today we're into pixels.
Each ``bulb'' is actually three tiny diodes -- red, green and blue. Now, an artist would tell you that the three primary colors are red, yellow and blue. But to create the entire spectrum of light, the magic trio is red, green and blue.
The company responsible for the displays, Daktronics, is the same firm that created the gargantuan scoreboard at Jacobs Field and thousands of other sports and entertainment displays around the world. . . .
Northern lights
The new boards came to life in a little town near the Big Sioux River on the plains of eastern South Dakota.
This is a region where the roads run either directly north and south or directly east and west. A lot of them are dirt, and all of them are flat.
If you take the biggest one going north from Sioux Falls, you'll arrive about an hour later in Brookings, S.D.
``Population 18,504,'' says the sign -- and fully 10 percent of those folks work at Daktronics.
What on Earth is this sophisticated company doing in the middle of the prairie? Simple. It was a solution to brain drain.
Brookings is home to the state's largest university, 11,000-student South Dakota State. By 1968, two SDSU engineering professors had grown weary of watching their best and brightest flee after picking up diplomas. So the profs decided to launch a company that would require the services of electrical engineers.
They incorporated as Daktronics -- a blend of Dakota and Electronics.
The early projects were rudimentary sports scoreboards and simple electronic voting machines for state legislatures.
But today, Daktronics is the worldwide leader in programmable displays, a force so powerful that it drove the gigantic Sony Corp. right out of the North American scoreboard business.
Daktronics has signs and scoreboards all over Las Vegas... at Times Square... at every Olympic venue since 1988... at 1,000 colleges... and at 80 percent of the arenas and stadiums used by professional baseball, football and basketball teams -- including not only the Jake but Cleveland Browns Stadium and The Arena Formerly Known As Gund (aka Quicken Loans Arena). . . .
Feeling blue
The company's big breakthrough came in the mid-1990s. Until then, Sony had so ruled the market that the brand name JumboTron had nearly become the generic name for video scoreboard.
But Sony's big CRTs (cathode-ray tubes, same as traditional televisions) were outrageously expensive, ungodly heavy and lacking in brightness. And they seemed to break down a lot.
The solution appeared to be light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. But nobody could figure out how to make decent blue ones. The red ones were fine. The green ones were fine. But the blue ones simply weren't bright enough.
Blue was tricky because blue has the shortest wavelength of visible light.
For 20 years, all of the biggies -- Sony, RCA, Hewlett-Packard, Matsu****a -- had been pounding away in their research labs, always in vain. Finally, a guy working for little Nichia Chemical Industries in Japan figured it out.
All of a sudden, you could create a huge full-color display with LEDs.
Daktronics produced its first LED video scoreboards in 1997, shipping them to the University of Oklahoma, Clemson and Washington State.
Since then, the company's business has exploded. Daktronics has products in 70 countries and so many orders that it is constructing a 100,000-square-foot addition to the 250,000-square-foot factory it already owns on a 40-acre complex next to Interstate 29.
How hot is that product line? If Daktronics never gets another order, the factory will be busy through March.
The operation is already running seven days a week, with three shifts on weekdays. . . . The project manager for the Beacon's $218,000 order, Trevor Moser, is all of 22 years old, straight out of SDSU. . . .
Go State! ;D
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/12858023.htm
Clock tower puts Beacon in new light
$500,000 project does more than give time, temperature
By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
The term ``Beacon Journal clock tower'' has just become obsolete.
This time, you're getting a lot more than a clock. This thing is a scoreboard. Or maybe a video game. We're not exactly sure yet.
We can flash it, blink it or stream it. We can roll it, scroll it or hold it. We can change the colors. We can even give you full-color animation.
Yes, you'll still get the time and temperature, just as you have for the last 66 years. But our new $500,000 tower will also provide news, advertisements, event information and whatever else our mad programmers dream up.
The lower display consists of a four-sided message board, each side 12 feet wide and 3 ˝ feet high. That's where the news and ads will go.
The upper screens, 7 feet by 3 ˝ feet, will alternate between the time and temp, ``Akron Beacon Journal'' and the logo of the newspaper's Internet partner, Ohio.com.
Forget the neon lights that went up in 1939 and the gaudier ones that went up in 1955. Forget the floodlights that went up in 1966. Today we're into pixels.
Each ``bulb'' is actually three tiny diodes -- red, green and blue. Now, an artist would tell you that the three primary colors are red, yellow and blue. But to create the entire spectrum of light, the magic trio is red, green and blue.
The company responsible for the displays, Daktronics, is the same firm that created the gargantuan scoreboard at Jacobs Field and thousands of other sports and entertainment displays around the world. . . .
Northern lights
The new boards came to life in a little town near the Big Sioux River on the plains of eastern South Dakota.
This is a region where the roads run either directly north and south or directly east and west. A lot of them are dirt, and all of them are flat.
If you take the biggest one going north from Sioux Falls, you'll arrive about an hour later in Brookings, S.D.
``Population 18,504,'' says the sign -- and fully 10 percent of those folks work at Daktronics.
What on Earth is this sophisticated company doing in the middle of the prairie? Simple. It was a solution to brain drain.
Brookings is home to the state's largest university, 11,000-student South Dakota State. By 1968, two SDSU engineering professors had grown weary of watching their best and brightest flee after picking up diplomas. So the profs decided to launch a company that would require the services of electrical engineers.
They incorporated as Daktronics -- a blend of Dakota and Electronics.
The early projects were rudimentary sports scoreboards and simple electronic voting machines for state legislatures.
But today, Daktronics is the worldwide leader in programmable displays, a force so powerful that it drove the gigantic Sony Corp. right out of the North American scoreboard business.
Daktronics has signs and scoreboards all over Las Vegas... at Times Square... at every Olympic venue since 1988... at 1,000 colleges... and at 80 percent of the arenas and stadiums used by professional baseball, football and basketball teams -- including not only the Jake but Cleveland Browns Stadium and The Arena Formerly Known As Gund (aka Quicken Loans Arena). . . .
Feeling blue
The company's big breakthrough came in the mid-1990s. Until then, Sony had so ruled the market that the brand name JumboTron had nearly become the generic name for video scoreboard.
But Sony's big CRTs (cathode-ray tubes, same as traditional televisions) were outrageously expensive, ungodly heavy and lacking in brightness. And they seemed to break down a lot.
The solution appeared to be light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. But nobody could figure out how to make decent blue ones. The red ones were fine. The green ones were fine. But the blue ones simply weren't bright enough.
Blue was tricky because blue has the shortest wavelength of visible light.
For 20 years, all of the biggies -- Sony, RCA, Hewlett-Packard, Matsu****a -- had been pounding away in their research labs, always in vain. Finally, a guy working for little Nichia Chemical Industries in Japan figured it out.
All of a sudden, you could create a huge full-color display with LEDs.
Daktronics produced its first LED video scoreboards in 1997, shipping them to the University of Oklahoma, Clemson and Washington State.
Since then, the company's business has exploded. Daktronics has products in 70 countries and so many orders that it is constructing a 100,000-square-foot addition to the 250,000-square-foot factory it already owns on a 40-acre complex next to Interstate 29.
How hot is that product line? If Daktronics never gets another order, the factory will be busy through March.
The operation is already running seven days a week, with three shifts on weekdays. . . . The project manager for the Beacon's $218,000 order, Trevor Moser, is all of 22 years old, straight out of SDSU. . . .
Go State! ;D
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