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Your cart is empty.4.5 out of 5 stars
- #139,508 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
- #18 in LED Segment Displays
What's better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small display is to use an 8x8 matrix or a 4-digit 7-segment display. Matrices like these are 'multiplexed' - so to control all the seven-segment LEDs you need 14 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. Here at Adafruit we feel your pain! After all, wouldn't it be awesome if you could control a matrix without tons of wiring? That's where these adorable LED matrix backpacks come in. We have them in two flavors - a mini 8x8 and a 4-digit 0.56" 7-segment. They work perfectly with the matrices we stock in the Adafruit shop and make adding a bright little display trivial. The product kit comes with: A fully tested and assembled LED backpack Ultra-bright 4-digit 0.56" tall seven-segment display 4-pin header A bit of soldering is required to attach the matrix onto the backpack but its very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes. 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 7-segment. If you've been eyeing matrix displays but hesitated because of the complexity, this is the solution you've been looking for!
BV
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2024
I used this with a Raspberry Pi 3 for a project. There is plenty of documentation and Raspberry Pi libraries if you are willing to do some googling. It's got 16 brightness levels and I find even the lowest setting a little too bright for my home theater. I guess that would be my only complaint, but overall I would recommend it.
Paul McDonald
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2023
I ordered this on a Saturday and received it on Sunday. Works great.
Customer
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2019
Great product from Adafruit. The LCD is bright and visible from a distance. Library for product is easy to use via their website and easy to hookup on Raspi if you have some sort of breakout. Website instructs wiring in series to use multiple displays at once and the jumpers on the back make it very easy to change the chip address.
tranchant patrick
Reviewed in France on May 31, 2019
petit et pratiquefonctionne bien, manque un peu de doc, sinon RAS
Pierre Gervais
Reviewed in Canada on February 25, 2018
No comment
T. Beaulieu
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2018
I used this for a custom heating application. The build and functional quality of the display is spot-on. The included backpack is easy to install and makes working with the display (using their library) a piece of cake. I was able to focus on my application, without having to worry about the low-level operation of the display. I like the appearance of the white display. My only complaint is the lack of a bezel mount adapter. I wanted my final product to look good and that was really difficult to do with this display. Without a bezel I had a make an exacting cutout in the box using a bridgeport milling machine at a friend's workplace. Something 99.9% of those using this product won't be able to do. There is zero room for error, without a bezel to snap in, while providing a frame around the display to hide the cutout. Pictured is the final product. I ordered a smoke-colored plastic piece from an enterprising person who's marketing an external bezel solution.
Ken
Reviewed in Canada on February 14, 2018
They are what I expected to receive.
QuinnTheValors
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2018
This item, despite arriving a week late, is awesome. I'm using it as the primary speedometer display for my car. This thing is BRIGHT. like, brighter than any 7 segment display I've ever seen. It shouldn't be an issue reading it in sunlight, however I haven't tested it.The backpack needs to be soldered, but if you're using a display like this, it should be no big deal. Other than that, it's extremely straightforward to use, and played nicely with my other I2C items on my arduino.
Achint
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2017
I have been using this Display for the last 7 months. This has been turned on continuously for the whole duration and has not failed yet. I am using it to display the current temperature of my area code. The display is bright and was easy to control with the ESP8266. However, there is some soldering required to completely assemble the display.SOLDERINGThis product came in two pieces. One was the display matrix (the display part where you see all the glowing digits) and a backpack (that contains the HT16K33 chip.) The backpack makes hides the complexities of controlling the display matrix so that you can only use 2 pins to control the display + 2 pins of power. However, backpack and display matrix needs to be soldered together. You would have to solder 18 pins to get the display matrix and backpack together.VOLTAGEI have been using nodeMCU which operates at 3.3 V and it is working fine. Adafruit's web site mentions that this can be powered with 3.3 or 5 V.PIN CONNECTIONSOnce you have the matrix and backpack connected, you can control the display with I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) protocol. This means you have to use only two pins for controlling the display. You would still have to provide power to the display. On the top of the display there are four pins.Pin marked as SCL in back (C in front) is the clock pin. This needs to be connected to the Clock/SCL pin on your microcontroller. On Node MCU this is D2 pin, on the Uno this is A4Pin marked as SDA in back (D in front) is the data pin. This needs to be connected to the SDA/data pin on your micro-controller. On Node MCU this is D1 pin, on the Arduino Uno this is A5Pin marked as GND in back (- in front) is the round pin.This needs to be connected to any of the GND pins on your micro-controller.Pin marked as VCC in back (+ i front) is the voltage pin. This needs to be connected to the pin marked as 3.3v or 5V on your micro-controller.SOFTWARE LIBRARYI have been using nodeMCU to control the display. The Adafruit_LEDBackpack library works fine and is very easy to write data using the Adafruit_7segment class. The Adafruit_7segment.print, draw methods let me write HEX or Base 10 numbers to the display. Adafruit_7segment.drawColon would control the colon on the display.
RedVortex
Reviewed in Canada on April 5, 2017
Took 30 seconds to install and configure in the Raspberry (after soldering the pins to the board to connect the 4 pins to the Pi). Works very well. This was our second order because the first one was missing the i2c board which made this useless with the Pi. I recommend it.
Luis
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2016
Pretty cool and easy to program. They did a good job putting this 4x7-Segment display together with an HT16K33 chip in the backpack. It's I2C so you can talk to it very easy. It has 3 connections on the back that you can short out to change the address (default is 0x70 and can go all the way to 0x77). Soldering it wasn't that hard either, just be sure you follow the instructions on the website to connect it in the right position first before you solder it.If you are using Raspbian, there are libraries already to control it, if you are using Windows 10 IoT (which is what I'm using), it's pretty straight forward to write code to talk to it. You can turn each bit on and off individually, row 0,1,3,4 on the HT16K33 are each digit (from left to right) and row 2 is the colon. The last bit on each digit is the period.With the HT16k33 you can set the brightness (16 levels) and blink rate (2Hz, 1Hz or 0.5Hz)
Customer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2016
works great, many thanks!
reviews
Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2013
I have prime so I have free two day shipping thing so this thing is only about 1 dollar more expensive than buying off the Adafruit website and it arrived a few days quicker than the one I bought off there but that was more USPS having some unknown problems that pushed back the delivery date. It's three pieces all very straight forward to use. The Adafruit website has tutorials on how to put them together and how to use the display. It works great with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno to make a clock, stopwatch, and pretty much anything clock/time related.
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