Phys Comp Studio: DIY 7 Segment LED Controls
I made my own 7 segment LED with 21 LEDs and a small piece of perfboard. I had planned on using a normal premade 7 seg display, but I fried 2 of the 3 I bought trying to use them with a 16 channel LED driver chip and a darlington array (i gave them too much power and some of the segments burnt out), and I couldn't find the third one, and in a rush to accomplish something I ended up building this. It took a few very focused hours of soldering. I really dig the look, definitely something of a happy accident.
Since I don't have enough digital outs left on my Arduino for a 7 segment LED driver chip I had to control it through my chain of shift registers. I had to manually write an array for which shift register pins to switch on and off for digits 0 through 9. Here it is:
int digitArray[] = {//zero
1,1,1,1,0,1,1,
//one
0,0,1,1,0,0,0,
//two
0,1,1,0,1,1,1,
//three
0,1,1,1,1,1,0,
//four
1,0,1,1,1,0,0,
//five
1,1,0,1,1,1,0,
//six
1,1,0,1,1,1,1,
//seven
0,1,1,1,0,0,0,
//eight
1,1,1,1,1,1,1,
//nine
1,1,1,1,1,1,0
};
And here's two examples of it in action. The top video shows it counting 1... 2... 3... 4... with the tempo of the loop. The bottom video shows it moving from 0 to 9 as I turn the shift register.
