What is it?

The Retro Display is an easy to use, cool looking display that can work with a wide range of projects. Arduino, ESP32, and RaspberryPi and more!

The Retro Display is an easy to read, bright, vibrant display you can use to provide at a glance information about your next IoT project.

This is a fully assembled module - but will require you to provide the brains to drive the display, an Arduino is ideal.

Why did you make it?

The idea for this product evolved from a personal IoT project that needed a vibrant display. Initially I thought 7-segment, but then after consideration I thought I might need to show text too, so switched it up to a 14 segment display. After looking around I found the Adafruit backpack for 14-segment displays - but they only had 4 characters in their display, so I decided to expand the display to 6 characters. I also added some additional LEDs to the display, so that a clock or other visuals could be easily displayed.

What makes it special?

This is a compact vibrant LED display, that is easy to hookup to all manner of micro-controllers, and mini computers. The interface is I2C and the chip has libraries for all manner of devices (ESP, Arduino, RaspberryPi and more) plus Adafruit has a library, and I have also written an Arduino library specifically for the display that works with ESP boards, and PlatformIO.

Tech Specs

The display works with both 3.3v and 5v projects. Has multiple brightness settings, and additional pad layouts for further expansion - like the button positions across the top of the digit segments. The display does not come with a micro-controller - but it has been designed to work with Arduino boards, and ESP32 boards. The pin header matches the original LOLIN32 ESP boards - for even easier use (my original use case was built around an ESP LOLIN32 weather station).

For more information about the project - follow the links to the homepage tickertape.cc