Drive a 7-Segment LED with an Arduino

13 Responses to Drive a 7-Segment LED with an Arduino

1. Solar Interested on January 29th, 2013 at 7:40 pm said:

   Thanks for this. I’m just starting out with my Arduino and had a common cathode 7 segment display so your code was just what I wanted to get started.
2. JI on March 25th, 2013 at 7:38 am said:

   In order to multiple 7-segment LED… How can we do a dedicated 7-segment LED driver?
   Thanks.
3. Bert on March 28th, 2013 at 11:06 pm said:

   I tried to verify the code and got errors… please confirm
4. Karla Lopez (@vivoandando) on June 29th, 2013 at 8:03 pm said:

   Hi,

   I was also having trouble with this code. After a little bit I finally got it working and submited a pull request on GitHub but apparently they don’t accept requests very often.

   If you’re having trouble, feel free to try my version on https://github.com/karlalopez/Make-Projects/tree/master/_7_segment

   Cheers!
5. Sam Threetree on July 15th, 2013 at 4:20 pm said:

   If you want to build it yourself and like to solder, LucidTronix has a DIY kit that makes the wiring easier: http://lucidtronix.com/products/7
6. Chris Stamelos on December 5th, 2013 at 2:56 pm said:

   the code is full of bugs pfff

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8. frog on September 7th, 2014 at 4:10 am said:

   Your Code on Github has a few mistakes in it… I posted a pull request…
9. David Goodrich on October 9th, 2014 at 8:54 am said:

   I was looking for a good starting point for lighting up a similar LED that I had wanted to use on a project (with potentiometer, sound, and servo motor). The project turned out well, but I ended up scrapping this code and wanted to give a respectful warning to others that this code will need a little work, so be prepared.

   Firstly, it won’t compile as-is with the couple of typos it has.

   In my case, my LED uses HIGH to light up (as you might expect), so bear this in mind.

   From an efficiency standpoint also you may want to consider encapsulating some of the digitalWrite logic so that there are not as many lines of redundant code.

   I’d be curious to see what Mr. Frog (commenter below) had done. I ended up overdoing it a little with a way to pass the on/off codes as a string encoding, but this is a good talking point for any student learners.

   e.g.

   void light_all() { drawLEDfromArray( “11111111” ); }
   void clear_all() { drawLEDfromArray( “00000000” ); }
   void char_A() { drawLEDfromArray( “11101110” ); }

   void drawLEDfromArray( char bits[] ) {
   // this lights up LED segments 0..8 when the correspond ing array item is ‘1’
   for (int i=0; i < LED_segments ; i++)
   if (bits[i] == '1')
   light_on(LED_Pins[i]);
   else light_off(LED_Pins[i]);
   }
10. Scott on October 16th, 2014 at 3:43 pm said:

    MAKE – Will you consider a tutorial on using an Arduino to drive a pair of “large” set of these LEDs? Those big displays as you know require 9-12V and can not be driven by microcontroller pins or a shift register (not even the tpic6b595).

    Arduino forums are littered with novices asking how to do this (and surprisingly no one’s published a web tutorial, just some YouTube videos showing a successful build).

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12. HiI'mJEF on January 7th, 2018 at 12:06 am said:

    would it be possible to command 7 segment 0-9 in dosbox or cmd using notepad?

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