An 840-Segment Display Is Even More Awesome Than It Sounds

If you’d like to display numbers, or sometimes ambiguous letters, 7-segment LED displays can usually get the job done. But what if you got your hands on 120 of these characters after a vaguely-recalled eBay purchase? Like David Barton (aka “limpfish”), you might just stuff them in a drawer for future use.

After digging them out later, Barton initially found that they wouldn’t play nicely with the Max7219 LED controller because of a common anode setup. Undeterred, this hacker then rewired things, and after some fancy Arduino coding got everything working together.

The results are absolutely incredible, clearly showing a 3D box, as well as a bouncing ball that looks like it could have come straight from the 1980s!