How to Hook up the Sparkfun 7-Segment Display to a Raspberry Pi

https://medium.com/@jonah.lefkoff/how-to-hook-up-the-sparkfun-7-segment-display-to-a-raspberry-pi-577591ba94b5

How to Hook up the Sparkfun 7-Segment Display to a Raspberry Pi

In this guide we’ll go over how I hooked the Large Sparkfun 7-Segment Display up to a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

*This guide is specifically to hook up two of these displays together. It may require some modification for just one display.*

 

Step 1: Solder the large digit driver to your displays.

Carefully solder the driver board to the display as shown.

Credit Sparkfun

Step 2: Hook up the Digits to the Pi

You must have both a 5v and a 12v power to the driver board. In addition, you can put the latch, clock, and data pins into any valid GPIO pins. In this case I have put them into board pins 11, 13, and 15.

The full wiring for the displays

Step 3: The code

I have modified the arduino code on Sparkfun to work on the Raspberry Pi.

This code will display numbers 1–99, but you can use the showNumber() method to do whatever you want.

The code I found that was made for the Raspberry pi had an issue with the counting code. I resolved this by just making a while loop and incrementing a variable.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#By Jonah
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
from time import sleepGPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
segmentClock=11
segmentLatch=13
segmentData=15GPIO.setup(segmentClock,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(segmentData,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(segmentLatch,GPIO.OUT)GPIO.output(segmentClock,GPIO.LOW)
GPIO.output(segmentData,GPIO.LOW)
GPIO.output(segmentLatch,GPIO.LOW)number=0#Takes a number and displays 2 numbers. Display absolute value (no negatives)
#look here maybe bug between value+number
def showNumber(value):
        number = abs(value) #Remove negative signs and any decimals
        x=0
        while(x<2):
                remainder=number % 10
                postNumber(remainder)
                number /= 10
                x += 1#Latch the current segment data
        GPIO.output(segmentLatch,GPIO.LOW)
        GPIO.output(segmentLatch,GPIO.HIGH) #Register moves storage register on the rising edge of RCK#Given a number, or - shifts it out to the display
def postNumber(number):
        a=1<<0
        b=1<<6
        c=1<<5
        d=1<<4
        e=1<<3
        f=1<<1
        g=1<<2
        dp=1<<7if   number == 1: segments =     b | c
        elif number == 2: segments = a | b |     d | e |     g
        elif number == 3: segments = a | b | c | d |         g
        elif number == 4: segments =     b | c |         f | g
        elif number == 5: segments = a |     c | d     | f | g
        elif number == 6: segments = a |     c | d | e | f | g
        elif number == 7: segments = a | b | c
        elif number == 8: segments = a | b | c | d | e | f | g
        elif number == 9: segments = a | b | c | d     | f | g
        elif number == 0: segments = a | b | c | d | e | f
        elif number == ' ': segments = 0
        elif number == 'c': segments = g | e | d
        elif number == '-': segments = g
        else : segments = False#if (segments != dp):
        y=0
        while(y<8):
                GPIO.output(segmentClock,GPIO.LOW)
                GPIO.output(segmentData,segments & 1 << (7-y))
                GPIO.output(segmentClock,GPIO.HIGH)
                y += 1x=0
while(x < 100):
        showNumber(x)
        x += 1
        sleep(0.5)
GPIO.cleanup()

Step 4: Bask in the glory of your new displays!

It works!!!