Using 14 And 16 Segment Displays
January 22, 2012 by ama
Filed under Fix My Computer
You’ll be acquainted with the LED display that you have in your clock radio – each digit, of which there are typically 4, is made from 7 segments, or individual LEDs. Frequently in the middle of the display there is a colon symbol, to separate the hours from the minutes. And while you can display some letters, regularly awkwardly, mostly it’s really only good for showing numbers.
The issue comes with letters that have diagonal elements like the letter Y for instance, or X. Those letters are virtually impossible to display on a seven segment display. The other set of letters that are difficult are letters with vertical elements in the middle of the digit – like the letter T.
That’s the reason why it comes in handy to add more segments to each digit. It does not take many – just by adding 2 vertical segments, breaking the middle horizontal segment in 2, and adding 4 diagonal segments we are now afforded the facility to produce all of the capital letters in a way that makes them seem natural and in fact, very readable.
The letter Y can be made from one of the new vertical segments and 2 diagonal ones, the letter Z has a pleasant, clean look and the letter K becomes possible and the letter R becomes actually articulate.
So if you can do all this with a fourteen segment display, is there any point in adding any more segments? As it turns out, adding 2 more segments (simply by splitting the very top and bottom horizontal segments) lots more things become possible – including an entire alphabet of fairly reasonable lower case letters, and some new punctuation symbols, like squiggly brackets, colons and p.c signs.
Moving to what is effectively a graphical display, a LED display panel, or LED matrix display as they’re sometimes called, is the following step in effectively adding segments. At this point, not only are you able to display any character you like but you can begin to use different types of fonts and even different sized characters. Not to mention actually being able to display graphics! Nevertheless at this point, you are powering lots more LEDs, with the added difficulty of driving thousands of pixels.
So by adding a few more segments to what would have been a common-or-garden seven segment display, you can get some rather good looking letters and symbols, without getting to the complexity of requiring LED display panels.
Embedded Adventures is the place to go for things you could need in your next microcontroller project, like an alphanumeric display, a 14 or sixteen segment display, or even a LED matrix display.
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