FeatherWing of the Day: Adafruit 0.54″ Quad Alphanumeric FeatherWing Display – White #WingOfTheDay « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit 0.54″ Quad Alphanumeric FeatherWing Display – White!

Display, elegantly, 012345678 or 9! Gaze, hypnotized, at ABCDEFGHIJKLM – well it can display the whole alphabet. You get the point.

This is the White Adafruit 0.54″ Dual Alphanumeric Display w/ FeatherWing Combo Pack! We also have these combo packs in Green, Red, Blue, Yellow-Green, and Yellow. This is a nice, bright alphanumeric display that shows letters and numbers in a beautiful hue. It’s super bright and designed for viewing from distances up to 23 feet (7 meters) away. Each of the digit sets have 14 segments on a dark background and we give you a set of two alphanumeric displays as well as a Featherwing driver board so you can make a clock or a four letter word.

Works with any and all Feathers!

14-Segment Matrices like these are ‘multiplexed’ – so to control all the fourteen-segment LEDs you need 18 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. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That’s where these Alphanumeric LED Matrix FeatherWings come in, they make it really easy to add a 4-digit alphanumeric display with decimal points.

The LEDs themselves do not connect to the Feather. Instead, a matrix driver chip (HT16K33) does the multiplexing for you. The Feather simply sends i2c commands to the chip to tell it what LEDs to light up and it is handled for you. This takes a lot of the work and pin-requirements off the Feather. Since it uses only I2C for control, it works with any Feather and can share the I2C pins for other sensors or displays.

The product kit comes with: