7 Segments of USB-driven fun

My darling wife raided Makershed for my Christmas gifts. Among them was a fun little project called the USB7, a set of 6 7-segment displays that are powered by, and interface through, a USB port. It’s powered by an ATMega, not unlike an Arduino. The kit itself just requires solder assembly, so a soldering iron, needle-nose pliers, and diagonal cutters will suffice for tools. The PCB is phenomenally easy to work with, with clear silk-screen markings to tell you which components go where and in what orientation. It’s probably the most user-friendly kit board I’ve ever seen!

As for the final result? It’s actually very handy. Getting the drivers for it installed was a touch fussy, but after that, it exposes a simple COM port and you can interact with the project using a terminal program. Six characters and a newline…that’s all it takes to update the display.

What’s great about the simple protocol is that it actually lets you do some fairly complex things. For example, you can use whitespace characters to create simple scrolling animation effects. You can also configure LCD Smartie to work with it, exposing interesting goings-on in your host machine to the display. The board also has a header for reprogramming the microcontroller. I’m certainly going to have fun mucking about in the code because the USB interactions appear to be 100% in software.

In short, it’s a fun way to spend a couple hours and you get a really neat component at the end. I highly recommend it, especially for beginners.

Picture below is from the creator’s site. My digital camera is AWOL at the moment.