Collaborate Disseminate
Good clocks are generally those that keep time well. But we think the mark of a great clock is one that can lure the observer into watching time pass. It doesn’t really matter how technical a timepiece is — watching sand shimmy through an hourglass has its merits, too. But …read more
Continue reading Servo-Powered 7-Segments Choreograph This Chronograph
What do you do with 144 7-segment displays? If you’re [Frugha] you put them all together to create an epic clock. Each display has 8 individual LEDs — 7 segments, and a decimal point. Put that all together, and you’ve got 1152 individual LEDs to control. This presented a problem, …read more
Continue reading 144 7-Segment Displays Combine To Form A Mighty Clock
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams opine on the coolest hacks we saw this week. This episode is heavy with 3D printing as Prusa released a new, smaller printer, printed gearboxes continue to impress us with their power and design, hoverboards are turned into tanks, and researchers suggest you …read more
There are a variety of means by which numbers can be displayed from an electronic circuit, and probably the most ubiquitous remains the seven-segment display. Take seven LEDs, lamps, LCDs, VFD segments or mechanical flip-dot style units in the familiar rectangular figure eight, and your microcontroller or similar can display …read more
How do you hack your motivation? Do you put red marker Xs on a paper calendar every day you exercise? Do you use an egg timer to sprint through dozens of emails? Do you lock all the doors and shut off your data to write some bulletproof code? If you …read more
Like most of his work, this tiny two-digit thermometer shows that [David Johnson-Davies] has a knack for projects that make efficient use of hardware. No pin is left unused between the DS18B20 temperature sensor, the surface mount seven-segment LED displays, and the ATtiny84 driving it all. With the temperature flashing …read more
Continue reading Tiny Two-Digit Thermometer Has Long Battery Life
[Peter Lehnér] has designed a brilliant 7-segment flip-segment display that doesn’t really flip. In fact, it doesn’t use electromagnets at all. This one is 3D printed and hand cranked. It’s a clever use of a cam system to set the segments for each digit (0-9) makes it a perfect entry in the Hackaday 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams contest.
We find the nomenclature of these displays to be a bit confusing so let’s do a quick rundown. You may be most familiar with flip-dot displays, basically a dot-matrix grid of physical pixels that are black on one side and …read more
Continue reading 7-Segment Display is 3D Printed and Hand Cranked
It’s safe to say that hot-melt glue is a staple of the projects we see here at Hackaday. There won’t be many readers who don’t have a glue gun, and a blob of the sticky stuff will secure many a project. But it’s not so often we see it used as an integral component for a property other than its stickiness, so [DusteD]’s reaction timer project is interesting for having hot glue as a translucent light guide and diffuser for its LED seven-segment display.
The timer is simple enough, being driven by an Arduino board, while the display is pre-formed …read more
We love electromagnetic displays: take the modern look of a digital readout, combine with the low-tech coil mechanism that you theoretically could create yourself, add a dash of random clacking sounds, and what’s not to like? Evidently, [Nicolas Kruse] shares our affection for these displays, because he’s taken it beyond theory and created a 7-segment magnetically-actuated display from scratch.
The display is 3D-printed, as you would expect these days. Each segment contains a small neodymium magnet, and each coil a 1 mm iron core for flux concentration. The coils are driven with a 1.6 A peak current, causing the segments …read more
Continue reading Electromagnetic 7-Segment Display Easy on the Eyes AND the Ears
In a way, all 7-segment displays are alike; at least from the outside looking in. On the inside it can be quite another story, and that’s certainly the case with the construction of this Soviet-era 7-segment numerical display. From the outside it may look a bit sturdier than usual, but it’s still instantly recognizable for what it is. On the inside is an unusual mixture of incandescent bulbs and plastic light guides.
The rear of the display is a PCB with a vaguely hexagonal pattern of low-voltage incandescent bulbs, and each bulb mates to one segment of the display. The …read more
Continue reading Soviet-Era 7-Segment Display, Built Like a Tank