11:02 AM
Kinsz
You'll be acquainted with the LED display that you have in your clock-radio - each digit, of which there are usually 4, is made from 7 segments, or individual LEDs. Often in the middle of the display there's a colon symbol, to separate the hours from the minutes. And while you can certainly display some letters, often roughly, usually it's really only good for showing numbers.
The difficulty comes with letters that have diagonal elements like the letter Y for instance, or X. Those letters are pretty much impossible to display on a 7 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 is the reason why it will be useful to add more segments to each digit. It doesn't take many - simply by adding 2 vertical segments, breaking the middle horizontal segment in 2, and adding four diagonal segments we are now afforded the ability 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 of 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 essentially understandable.
So if you can do all this with a fourteen segment display, is there any point in adding any more segments? As it happens, adding two more segments (effectively by splitting the very top and bottom horizontal segments) many more things become possible - including an entire alphabet of fairly reasonable lower case letters, and a handful of new punctuation symbols, like squiggly brackets, colons and % signs.
Moving to what is effectively a graphical display, a LED display panel, or LED matrix display as they are often called, is the following step in effectively adding segments. At this point, not only are you able to display any letter or symbol you like but you can start to use different kinds of fonts and different sized characters. Not to mention actually being able to display graphics! However, at this point, you're powering lots more LEDs, with the added complexity of driving thousands of pixels.
So by adding some more segments to what would have been a humble seven segment display, you can get some rather good looking letters and symbols, without getting to the difficulty of requiring LED display panels.
The difficulty comes with letters that have diagonal elements like the letter Y for instance, or X. Those letters are pretty much impossible to display on a 7 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 is the reason why it will be useful to add more segments to each digit. It doesn't take many - simply by adding 2 vertical segments, breaking the middle horizontal segment in 2, and adding four diagonal segments we are now afforded the ability 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 of 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 essentially understandable.
So if you can do all this with a fourteen segment display, is there any point in adding any more segments? As it happens, adding two more segments (effectively by splitting the very top and bottom horizontal segments) many more things become possible - including an entire alphabet of fairly reasonable lower case letters, and a handful of new punctuation symbols, like squiggly brackets, colons and % signs.
Moving to what is effectively a graphical display, a LED display panel, or LED matrix display as they are often called, is the following step in effectively adding segments. At this point, not only are you able to display any letter or symbol you like but you can start to use different kinds of fonts and different sized characters. Not to mention actually being able to display graphics! However, at this point, you're powering lots more LEDs, with the added complexity of driving thousands of pixels.
So by adding some more segments to what would have been a humble seven segment display, you can get some rather good looking letters and symbols, without getting to the difficulty of requiring LED display panels.
About the Author:
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 maybe even a LED matrix display.
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