Oct 012011
16 Segment LEDs are (obviously) somewhere between 7 segment LED and graphical displays. Quite micro-controller friendly as they do not need a lot of memory or CPU performance or external hardware, but they look better and can display the full range of alphanumerical characters.
For those using these type of displays, a lot of time is spent trying to find “bitmap” data for characters. Some special ICs contain those already, but that I have none of those. After searching for font data and coming up empty-handed, I created my own:
// Segment bit order is A1 A2 B C D1 D2 E F G1 G2 H I J K L M
const unsigned int uiCharacterMap[0x40] =
{
// 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0xff09, 0x3008, 0xec41, 0xdc48, 0x01d2, 0xcd84, 0x1fc0, 0xc00a, 0xffc0, 0xf1c0,
0x7712, 0x3300, 0x6742, 0x7740, 0x3350, 0x5750, 0x1752, 0x7300, 0x7752, 0x7350
};
Those are digits 0 to 19 (yes, not just 0 to 9). Unfortunately 20 does not work, and neither do 22 or 23. Here a video of the 20 numbers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI8WTVAadiA