Tips on how to use classic LED bubble shows together with your Arduino

If you wish to add a show to your Arduino challenge, the simplest resolution will possible be an LCD or OLED display. However although these are inexpensive and work very well, they might not present the vibe you’re in search of. In order for you a extra classic look, Vaclav Krejci has a terrific tutorial that can stroll you thru utilizing old-school LED bubble shows together with your Arduino.

Krejci’s video demonstrates methods to use HPDL-1414 shows, that are what most individuals name “bubble” shows, as a result of they’ve clear bubble-like lenses over every character’s array of LEDs. They have been pretty well-liked within the late ‘70s and ‘80s on sure gadgets, like calculators. These particular bubble shows can present the total vary of alphanumeric characters (uppercase solely), plus a handful of punctuation marks and particular symbols.

The HPDL-1414 shows Krejci used come on driver boards that set the characters based mostly on serial enter. Within the video, Krejci first connects these on to a PC by way of a serial-to-USB adapter board. That helps as an instance the management technique by means of guide byte transmission.

Then Krejci will get to the good things: connecting the HPDL-1414 bubble shows to an Arduino. He used an Arduino UNO Rev3, however the identical setup ought to work with any Arduino board. As you could have guessed based mostly on the PC demonstration, the Arduino controls the show by way of Serial.print() instructions. The hex code for every character matches the usual ASCII desk, which is fairly helpful. That makes it doable to Serial.write() these hex codes and even Serial.write() the precise characters.

Don’t fear if that sounds a bit of intimidating, as a result of Krejci has pattern code that can allow you to simply flip any arbitrary array of characters into the serial output you want. Now you should use these superior bubble shows in your personal tasks!