NEW PRODUCTS – White 7-segment clock display – 0.56 digit height & Adafruit 0.56″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display w/I2C Backpack – White. We’re posting both at the same time 🙂
White 7-segment clock display – 0.56 digit height – Design a clock, timer or counter into your next project using our pretty 4-digit seven-segment display. These bright crisp displays are good for adding numeric output. Besides the four 7-segments, there are decimal points on each digit and an extra wire for colon-dots in the center (good for time-based projects).
These are ultra bright 150mcd! You can drive these with less current to get the same brightness to save power, or crank them up to 20mA and have them really bright.
These displays are multiplexed, common-cathode. What that means it that you can use a 74HC595 or just 8 microcontroller pins if you can spare them to control the 8 anodes (7-seg + decimal) at about ~15mA each, and then connect NPN transistors or a TPIC6B595 to the cathodes to sink the 8*20mA = ~120mA maximum per digit.
These come in a bright white color, we also have many other sizes and colors!
Adafruit 0.56″ 4-Digit 7-Segment Display w/I2C Backpack What’s better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small display is to use an 8×8 matrix or a 4-digit 7-segment display. Matrices like these are ‘multiplexed’ – so to control all the seven-segment LEDs you need 14 pins. That’s a lot of pins, and there are driver chips like the MAX7219 that can control a matrix for you but there’s a lot of wiring to set up and they take up a ton of space. Here at Adafruit we feel your pain! After all, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That’s where these adorable LED matrix backpacks come in. We have them in two flavors – a mini 8×8 and a 4-digit 0.56″ 7-segment. They work perfectly with the matrices we stock in the Adafruit shop and make adding a bright little display trivial.
The matrices use a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you: They have a built in clock so they multiplex the display. They use constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color (the images above are photographed at the dimmest setting to avoid overloading our camera!), 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface. The backpacks come with address-selection jumpers so you can connect up to four mini 8×8’s or eight 7-segments (or a combination, such as four mini 8×8’s and four 7-segments, etc) on a single I2C bus.
The product kit comes with:
- A fully tested and assembled LED backpack
- Ultra-bright 4-digit 0.56″ tall white seven-segment display
- 4-pin header
A bit of soldering is required to attach the matrix onto the backpack but its very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes.
Of course, in classic Adafruit fashion, we also have a detailed tutorial showing you how to solder, wire and control the display. We even wrote a very nice library for the backpacks so you can get running in under half an hour, displaying images on the matrix or numbers on the 7-segment. If you’ve been eyeing matrix displays but hesitated because of the complexity, his is the solution you’ve been looking for!