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Display, elegantly, 012345678 or 9! Gaze, hypnotized, at ABCDEFGHIJKLM - well it can display the whole alphabet. You get the point. This is a nice, bright alphanumeric display that shows letters and numbers in a beautiful red hue. It's super bright and designed for viewing from distances up to 23 feet (7 meters) away. Digits have seven red segments on a black surface and we give you a set of two alphanumeric displays as well as a driver board so you can make a clock or a four letter word.
Like our other LED backpacks, these are end-to-end stackable and by soldering the address jumpers on the back you can have up to 8 backpacks all sharing the same two I2C wires!
To get you going fast, we have revised this popular board to be the same size and pinout as before but now with two STEMMA QT connectors on either side that are compatible with the SparkFun Qwiic I2C connectors. This allows you to make solderless connections between your development board and the HT16K33 or to chain it with a wide range of other sensors and accessories using a compatible cable.
This product comes with:
- 2 x Ultra-Bright Red Alphanumeric Display - 0.54" Digit Height for 4 digits total
- 1 x Adafruit 14-segment LED Alphanumeric Backpack
- 1 x 5-pin header
Revision History:
- As of August 9, 2022 - The backpack now comes in STEMMA QT format. Functionality and schematic remain the same, physical shape has changed to make it plug-and-play, much easier to use
Alphanumeric Display Dimensions:
- 21mm x 25mm x 7mm / 0.8" x 1" x 0.3"
- Height w/ Pins: 14mm / 0.6"
- Weight: 4.7g
Backpack Dimensions:
- 28mm x 51mm x 4mm / 1.1" x 2" x 0.2"
- Weight: 5.5g
P. Meyer
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2019
It's very difficult to code for. There's no print method so you're forced to do it all yourself and that's bad enough for ints but much worse for floats.The library uses a character map to translate the value you write to the value the display needs to display. They're not the same and there's no description of what map entries correlate to what display pattern. I had to write a sketch to display values slowly as their numeric value in the left three digits and the graphical value in the 4th just to identify what to write to to display a lower case b for example.Also the backpack left justifies the data and unlike the 7 segment displays these shift the data out in unexpected ways.I have more hours invested in just trying to make sense of this things behavior than in any one of my other projects. The example sketch, there is only one, is very simple and of very little help.Also, the display blanks out after a couple of minutes, I think it turns itself off. I don't know why but the next time it's written to it lights up again instantly. It doesn't seem to do this all the time, maybe one of those undescribed bitmaps triggers it.If you need a compact, information dense display this can do it but I'll find a way to make the friendlier 7-segment display serve and won't buy any more.
bbbnm
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2017
The middle two digits are coupled together. All the DIY solder joints were vacuum desoldered and reflowed just to eliminate PEBKAC. No dice.
joe
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2016
These are excellent quality displays. Other reviewers have already gone so far as to provide Arduino libraries for these boards, so I'm not going to redo all of that work. If you're not sure you have the right libraries, scan your i2c bus until you find the correct address settings. If nothing shows up, check your wiring. All there is to it for Arduino folks.Everything is as described, assembly's a snap.I've ordered a few of these at different times and the brightness is consistent at the same voltage levels across all of them. This is nice because I can order a new one, pull one out of a drawer, rip 2 out of an old project and know they're all going to look decent when chained together.Attached a photo showing a couple units in use pre-/post-assembly of a little clock / thermometer I put together.
Jason
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2015
This was fun to put together and program. Only criticism is that it's not quite red. It's more of a red-orange, kind the color tomatoes get when they're not quite ripe. This was disappointing, because I bought it to use as a tail light on my bike. It still works, but wasn't the result I was hoping for.
clipper
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2015
I originally bought this kit to build a digital speedometer for my motorcycle. I paired it with the adafruit ultimate gps breakout. Putting the kit together and soldering everything down took about 2 minutes, hookup took less than that. Within 5 minutes I had the example sketch up and running. It took me another day or so to work up a custom sketch using the provided adafruit libraries and tinygpsplus library. I used the adafruit libraries to drive the display and change settings on the gps chip, and tinygpsplus to parse nmea strings.The final gps speedometer is working perfectly. It utilizes the first display's center asterix to display the direction you are heading, the first display decimal point to show satellite fix status, and the last 3 displays to show speed. You may need to edit the display code a bit if you don't like truncated 3's or 5's.If you want a more traditional 7-segment display style 3 and 5, edit LEDBackpack.cppline 106, change to:0b0000000011001111, // 3line 108, change to:0b0000000011101101, // 5I have since bought another of these displays to build a digital tachometer for the bike.
linux-works
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2015
very simple to use, just follow adafruit's examples.one thing that isn't so great - but EASILY fixable - is that the adafruit style number fonts can look funny. the numeral 5 is a bit funny looking (they did that so that it does not look the same as an uppercase S). the zero is a slash style zero, which some may not like, either. fix is simple: edit the 'driver' code and look for the uppercase S and O and copy those bitmaps to where you see the numeral table (.h or .cpp file).I've attached some project/protoboard photos to show what this looks like in action. I have a project that uses both the numeric and alpha displays and you can see them both in my photos. note, the red displays are VERY bright. the lowest brightness is sometimes still too bright so you may want to put this behind a red plastic filter like I did.
Jonathan
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2015
Works great. Some characters are a little hard to read but that is just a function of the displays limitations due to segment count.
AWhistler
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2015
I use this along with a rangefinder to display distances in inches. The first two digits are the display, and the last two are "in." The display is very easy to program. Library code is available and easily modifiable. The brightness is adjustable, and can be set to blink (I have it blink if the range is too short to be accurate). I will be buying 7-segment versions, and generic boards from Adafruit, and perhaps a couple more of these.
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