13 Mar
2012
13 Mar
'12
2:20 a.m.
On 3/12/2012 1:43 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
What about the Panaplex 7-segemnt gas discharge displays?
I love those. I have an old Heathkit digital clock that uses three
separate Panaplex displays (two digits each) to display the time. And
then I have this:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/displays/babcock.jpg
Which is the same idea, only larger and with 8 digits. (The beer is
there to provide a size reference :)). The digits are 4" high. The
display unit itself came from some sort of industrial controller and
came with an Intel microcontroller and built-in powersupply. I
reverse-engineered the circuits driving the display and now have it
running off an AVR microcontroller, which I've programmed to run the
display as a clock (and why not.) Displays in octal, decimal, and
hexadecimal as well as "seconds elapsed this year" mode.
I also threw this together recently from some DL-1416 16-segment
displays I had in a parts bin:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/displays/16-segment.jpg
I have two plasma displays I need to find a good use for, one is a 20
character dot-matrix character display, the other is 40x8 characters. I
have specs for both and have gotten them to light up and do my bidding,
but I need to figure out what I want to do with them. Probably another
clock or two :).
- Josh
What about the neat-looking amber electroluminescent
panels that Planar
make? I always thought they looked cool.
Planar amber EL panels are nice (I have
an ELT320), but I don't think
they ever scaled that down to the 1-line size like some of intelligent
LED displays. They probably didn't need to move into the range that
VFDs have occupied very successfully, if I had to guess.
