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. This PCB allows for mounting a Particle Photon micro-controller The 12 volt line will be converted to 5 volts for the Photon and the i2c lines are directly connected. If you are not using a Photon, or want to chain more displays on the same i2c bus, there is this version without the Photon headers.

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 must also supply your own Particle Photon for this shield.

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.