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A project log for Neosegment - 7 Segment Display made with Neopixels

Creating a custom 7 segment display that can be driven with Arduino opens up some new possibilities.

maksim-surguyMaksim Surguy 12/25/2016 at 10:310 Comments

After the circuit board was designed, printed on photo paper, transferred onto copper and etched, it was a quick process to solder 7 LEDs onto it. Soldering took about 15 minutes start to finish and I imagine this could be done much faster if you can use a reflow oven instead of hand soldering each component.

I was impatient and soldered only 4 capacitors instead of 7 because I knew that this first prototype won't be chained together with other displays.

Here is how the populated circuit board looks like:

The lesson learned here was to create bigger pads for the Neopixels which will be taken care of in the next iteration of the PCB design.

I don't know if I need bypass capacitor on each and every LED or if putting one 10uf cap per 7 Segments would suffice so if you know the answer to that question, please let me know!

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