Nighttime view of clock implemented using a bunch of 7-segment displays (Click image to see a larger version - Image source: hackaday.io)īut wait, there’s more! Do you remember the old ASCII art pictures pieced together from the 95 printable members of the ASCII character set ( click here to see a bunch of images on Google)? Suppose we were to build a “canvas” comprising 24 rows x 48 columns = 1,152 of these 7-segment displays, and then use a script to take a scanned image and replicate it using the various display segments.

Of course, we could also scroll these messages across the display. It would also be interesting to see text characters implemented in this font, where these characters could be used to display messages composed of a series of (up to) 6-character words. This leads us to wonder how the creator of the clock came up with this font in the first place. This results in the unusual situation that each digit is 6-columns wide, with adjacent digits “sharing” a column - the upper-right corner of one digit shares the column with the lower-left corner to the digit to its right, if you see what I mean. One thing that immediately catches your eye is the slanting (dare one say “italic”) font. If we were to add another 12 columns (that’s 72 more 7-segment displays), we could also display the seconds, which would be rather cool. This little beauty is implemented using 144 (6 rows x 24 columns) 7-segment displays along with an Arduino Nano, a real-time clock (RTC), and 18 MAX7219 7-segment display driver ICs. Unfortunately, this isn’t particularly germane to the topic at hand, which is that I just saw the most amazing 7-Segment Display Array Clock project on Hackaday.io Daylight view of clock implemented using a bunch of 7-segment displays (Click image to see a larger version - Image source: hackaday.io) I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m fond of bacon sandwiches.

7 segment font