I continued to look for a 16 Segment Font, alas, there seems to be none. The best I found are two videos on YouTube. So I finally made my own one, and for the benefit of the world, here the code for all printable 96 ASCII characters:
#include <avr/pgmspace.h>
// Segment bit order is (MSB) A1 A2 B C D1 D2 E F G1 G2 H I J K L M (LSB)
const uint16_t uiCharacterMap[96] PROGMEM =
{
// SPACE ! " # $ % & '
0x0000, 0x0300, 0x0110, 0x0fd2, 0xddd2, 0x95db, 0x8eb4, 0x0010,
// ( ) * + , - . /
0x000c, 0x0021, 0x00ff, 0x00d2, 0x0001, 0x00c0, 0x0004, 0x0009,
// 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
0xff09, 0x3008, 0xec41, 0xdc48, 0x01d2, 0xcd84, 0x1fc0, 0xc00a,
// 8 9 : ; < = > ?
0xffc0, 0xf1c0, 0x8080, 0x8081, 0x0c09, 0xc0c0, 0x0c24, 0xe142,
// @ A B C D E F G
0xfe83, 0x3049, 0xfc52, 0xcf00, 0xfc12, 0xcfc0, 0xc3c0, 0xdf40,
// H I J K L M N O
0x33c0, 0xcc12, 0x3e00, 0x038c, 0x0f00, 0x3328, 0x3324, 0xff00,
// P Q R S T U V W
0xe3c0, 0xff04, 0xe3c4, 0xddc0, 0xc012, 0x3f00, 0x0309, 0x3305,
// X Y Z [ | ] ^ _
0x002d, 0x002a, 0xcc09, 0x8b00, 0x0024, 0x7400, 0x0120, 0x0c00,
// ` a b c d e f g
0x0020, 0x8e92, 0x0b82, 0x0a80, 0x0e92, 0x0a81, 0x40d2, 0x8992,
// h i j k l m n o
0x0382, 0x0a00, 0x0812, 0x001e, 0x0412, 0x12c2, 0x0282, 0x0a82,
// p q r s t u v w
0x8390, 0x8192, 0x0280, 0x0444, 0x04d2, 0x0e02, 0x0201, 0x1e02,
// x y z { | } ~ DEL
0x002d, 0x3450, 0x0881, 0x4492, 0x0012, 0x8852, 0x0128, 0x00ff
};
Note the PROGMEM extra attribute which is helpful on a Harvard CPU like the ATmega are. Without it, the table will be copied and used in RAM. 192 Byte in total does not sound too bad, unless you use an ATmega168 which has only 1 kByte. To access this type of special memory, you need the include file and to access the array, a special function is needed:
a=pgm_read_word_near(&(uiCharacterMap[i]));
It’s all documented here. On a normal CPU (more RAM, no Harvard architecture) you would not bother.
I thought about adding “spinning things”, but those are trivial to make and I thus leave those as an exercise to the reader.