Brilliant LED Projects: 20 Electronic Designs for Artists, Hobbyists, and Experimenters

CHAPTER 20Showing Numberson a Dot-Matrix Display:Dot-Matrix Counter

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED PROJECT 6 (mini digital display scoreboard) and project 14 (three-digit counter), you have built two types of digital counter, both of which use standard seven-segment LED displays to generate the numbers. Using seven-segment displays works fine in these applications, but one of the downsides is that the ways in which the numerical digits can be displayed are fairly limited. The project presented in this chapter shows you an alternative display method that uses a single, compact, 5 × 7 dot-matrix LED display like the one shown in Figure 20-1. The circuit uses persistence of vision (POV) to display the numerals, and you can select between two slightly ...