They're called seven-segment displays because they're actually made up of seven 'segments' - seven individual lights (LEDs or otherwise) that light up in different patterns that represent any of the ten digits (0 - 9).

They appear on pretty much every piece of electronic equipment that needs to display numbers for any reason, like the timer on a microwave oven, the display on a CD player, or the time on your digital wristwatch. BackgroundĮven if you haven't heard the name 'seven-segment display' before, you've probably seen quite a few in your lifetime. And, if you like the control and are able to use it, or learn from it, so much the better. I also wrote the control to become more familiar with the internals of C# and. That's why I decided to write this seven-segment LED control: not because it's any more 'useful' than a standard Label control, but because it looks freakin' sweet. Sometimes, there are certain controls that just beg to be written, whether they're useful or not. Your user base is already familiar with the OS's native controls, so creating custom controls would only add to the learning curve for your application. From the point of view of usability, it should always make the most sense to use the controls that are shipped with the Operating System. I'm usually not a big fan of custom controls except in the most extreme circumstances. Kind of an elegant solution as the software does not have to care what it is displaying but rather just needs to know the resolution.The source code is available on GitHub! Introduction A Pi Pico does all of the graphics computation and feeds the data to the FPGA for mapping to the 7 segment array. To control all of the display board I decided to go with an Intel MAX10 FPGA as I have worked with them a lot. I figured this gave a good balance between speed and not driving myself crazy with wiring. I decided that driving all sixty four MAX7219's in one massive SPI chain was probably a bad idea so they have been configured in eight rows of eight controllers each. I did not want to have one massive board to contain everything so I broke the display board into sixteen smaller boards.Įach board will contain a four MAX7219's driving two four character 7 segment displays for a total of 32 characters per board.

I decided on a nice round 512 seven segment displays. After seeing things like the DigitGrid and the Pligboot Matrix I decided that I was going to build a 7 segment LED matrix to add to my collection of LED clocks and displays.įirst off was deciding how big I wanted to go.

Led 7 segment display font