Hackers love 7 segment screens and will love to get lyrical about the crazy words you can almost spell on them and so on. Less prized are their bigger cousins, the fourteen and sixteen segment displays, which all become alphanumeric about things and thus much easier for humans to read. You can even build the first one out of Lego, like [ord] demonstrates.
A look at the mechanism that drives the display.
The “segments” consist of Lego shafts that are pushed up through a yellow matrix of holes when switched “on”. As many as seven motors are used to operate the single-character display, each driving two segments. It takes two Lego Powered Up controller bricks to control everything that happens here, making the final design not only mechanically complicated, but also electronically complicated.
Funnily enough, those aren’t cheap either; the total cost of parts for this build is probably somewhere between $50-100 US. You probably don’t want to build a full scrolling bulletin board with this design, even if it looks brilliant in black and taxi yellow.
We have seen [ord]’s work has also taken the form of these mechanically beautiful 7-segment Lego displays. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!]
This post Fourteen-segment Lego display needs a lot of motors
was original published at “https://hackaday.com/2022/04/12/lego-fourteen-segment-display-needs-plenty-of-motors/”
