From a flight tracker to a card price board
TCG Marquee started with a small LED sign I saw online. It shows the planes flying over your house, with the flight number and where each one is headed, in glowing dot matrix letters. I liked it right away and started thinking about what else could live on a screen like that.
Sports scores and weather were the obvious answers. Then I thought about the people I know who collect and sell trading cards. Card prices move every day, and most collectors check them by opening an app and scrolling. What if the prices just sat on the wall, glowing, the way a stock ticker does?
The first sketch
The idea was simple:
- Keep a list of the cards you own.
- Pull today's market price for each one from a card pricing service.
- Show the cards one at a time on an LED panel, with the price and how it moved this week.
- Run a ticker along the bottom, like a stock exchange board.
The pricing service I landed on is Scrydex, which covers Pokémon and several other card games, and includes graded card prices on its bigger plans.
That was a Saturday afternoon. By that evening I was building the first version.