The Sig7Seg-i2c board allows controlling 4" to 12" displays with a 3.3 or 5 volt control signal over i2c. Up to 8 controller can be chained together on the same i2c bus.

Electromechanical seven segment displays are super low power. They no longer require power once their segments are flipped. This is great a displays that changes only a few times per day. Unfortunately, they also require a 12 volt power supply and have 14 pins per display, making them difficult to control with your standard micro-controller (Arduino, ESP8266, RaspberryPI, etc). This board solves that problem by giving you an easy i2c interface with the popular MCP23017 chip.

What you get

This is the controller board PCB with surface mount components soldered on (by hand) and the through hole components which you can solder if you require them. This does not include a 12 Volt power supply. This does not include a seven segment display. You will also need your own micro-controller to attach to the i2c pins.

PCB colors vary with batches. You may receive a Red, Blue, Black, or other color board. All are the same other than the color.

Code

An open source library makes it easy to send digits or control the segments connected to the board over i2c. This library can be found at GitHub or in the Particle Library Manager (search for "sig7seg-i2c). This is based on other popular 7 segment libraries making it easy to swap out with common LED 7 segment display code. I've also created a CircuitPython library if you would prefer programming in Python.