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Display, elegantly, 012345678 or 9! Gaze, hypnotized, at ABCDEFGHIJKLM - well it can display the whole alphabet. You get the point.
A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the Adafruit 0.56" 4-Digit 14-Segment Display FeatherWing! This 14-segment FeatherWing backpack makes it really easy to add a bright alphanumeric display that shows letters and numbers in a beautiful hue. It's super bright and designed for viewing from distances up to 23 feet (7 meters) away.
Works with any and all Feathers!
14-Segment Matrices like these are 'multiplexed' - so to control all the fourteen-segment LEDs you need 18 pins. That's a lot of pins, and there are driver chips like the MAX7219 that can control a matrix for you but there's a lot of wiring to set up and they take up a ton of space. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That's where these Alphanumeric LED Matrix FeatherWings come in, they make it really easy to add a 4-digit alphanumeric display with decimal points.
The LEDs themselves do not connect to the Feather. Instead, a matrix driver chip (HT16K33) does the multiplexing for you. The Feather simply sends i2c commands to the chip to tell it what LEDs to light up and it is handled for you. This takes a lot of the work and pin-requirements off the Feather. Since it uses only I2C for control, it works with any Feather and can share the I2C pins for other sensors or displays.
This product kit comes with:
A bit of soldering is required to attach the matrix onto the FeatherWing but its very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes! Note: Feather board and 14-segment display are not included, but we have lots available in the shop.
Of course, in classic Adafruit fashion, we also have a detailed tutorial showing you how to solder, wire and control the display. We even wrote a very nice library for the backpacks so you can get running in under half an hour, displaying images on the matrix or numbers on the 14-segment. If you've been eyeing matrix displays but hesitated because of the complexity, this is the solution you've been looking for.