7 segment displays are a well established way of electronically displaying numbers and a small set of letters. They’ve been around for as long as I’ve been playing with electronics but were a pain to wire up given the number of LEDs involved.
Luckily things are a lot easier now that they are available on pre-made modules that uses an SPI interface. This is easy to setup and use on the Raspberry so for about £3 you can add a strip of 8 7 segment digits.
These modules tend to all use the Maxim MAX7219. This IC does all the hard work and we can communicate with it using SPI and a few lines of Python.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!