7-Segment Display

Ever been camping? Well, the kind of camp I’m at right now is different from your usual sitting by the campfire, sleeping in the woods kind of camping. That’s because I’m at the Engineering Science Quest (ESQ) Summer Camp hosted by the University of Waterloo!

Today, we learned how to use Arduino and make circuits with them. Even though I’m already familiar with the content, it’s been super fun because I got even more time to experiment with the circuits! For example, we first started of by lighting up an LED (they had such cool colours- I’ve never seen a blue LED that bright before!)

Video of me pressing a button to make an LED repeatedly blink very quickly.

There was a guest who came in and did a presentation on 7-segment displays, the topic of today’s post! A segment display is an electronic display that uses LEDs to create different characters/numbers. For example, you can find segment displays on calculators, microwaves, digital clocks, ovens, etc.

How The 7-Segment Display Works

In a seven segment display, there is an LED for each “segment,” which is connected to one of the eight pins.

(side-note: technically there’s an eighth LED for the circular segment on the bottom right, so I’ve always wondered why they don’t call it an 8-segment display instead…)

My Circuit(s)

The first version of the circuit we made was just connecting two segments to the Arduino and lighting them up. The purpose was to ease our way up to light them all up, especially since we had to puzzle out which pin connected to which LED. The diagram displayed on the screen did help lots though!

Image of 7-Segment Display Circuit Displaying a “1”

Diagram explaining the pin-out of the 7-segment display

After completing that though, we were given some time to play around with it and connect more segments to the Arduino and code it to light up (using the Arduino IDE).

I was determined to make every single number, so I got completely lost in my mad dash of typing and a lot of frantic copy pasting- so many lines were the same when I got numbers like 8, where all the segments would be lit up.

Here’s the final result:

Video of my circuit displaying all numbers from 1-9, followed by quickly showing off the code.

Final Thoughts

Before I finish off this quick post, I want to say I had a really fun time at camp today. Since most of my camping is the usual sitting by the campfire, sleeping in the woods kind of camping, I’m glad I got the chance to do something new.

Looking forward to the rest of my ESQ Adventures!

KD Tech Days