How to drive a 7 segment display directly on Raspberry Pi in Python
20/11/2015 Comments off
Last week I bought some 4-digit, 7-segment displays to experiment with. Strangely enough it was something I’d never tried before, so I was interested to see how they work. I googled around looking to see if someone else had done this before. It seems there are several different sorts of 7-segment displays, so you have to find a good match for the one you’ve bought.
You can get them in various guises including: i2c backpack; 12 pins; 16 pins; resistors built-in; common anode; common cathode etc.
The ones I bought are 12 pin, bare, no backpack, no PCB, no resistors, common cathode. Here’s what they look like…

7-segment display – rear
7-segment display