Arduino 14 Segment LED Display : Driver IC & Library

Among LED displays, it is TM1637 which is popular. When digits become more than 4, we need MAX 7219 IC, which is costly but commonly used. The cost makes 8 digit 7 Segment LED Display less commonly used. 14 Segment LED Display is almost exotic in programmable microcontroller world, because of less availability and higher cost of driver IC. Here is Information About Arduino 14 Segment LED Display Driver IC & Library. As it is less used component for higher price, possibly you have build module yourself. Then how cheap China electronics have 14 segment displays? They use different ICs, many of them are not in production.

Arduino 14 Segment LED Display : Driver IC & Library

The standard IC for 14 Segment LED Display is MAX695x family – MAX6954, MAX6955. They are costly but you’ll get good official documentation enough to run one single 14 Segment LED Display :

There is less known Arduino library for MAX6954 :

Some people actually worked huge behind :

And here is kind of Library for MAX6955 :

Coming to SparkFun’s one retired product :

That module used A6282 IC, here is datasheet :

RboCore company has well documented library and example :

Conclusion on 14 Segment LED Display

14 Segment LED Display looks great, but factually today we have RGB matrix displays. It is acceptable fact that 14 Segment LED Display is an outdated display technology but costs huge. RGB matrix display also cost huge, so as 8×8 matrix display units. However, if you want to display texts and digits, RGB matrix display are versatile and future proof. You’ll get lot of codes, projects with 8×8 matrix display units.

Definitely, you can buy a single 14 Segment LED unit. Driving one 14 Segment LED with Arduino, by principle is like driving one 7 Segment LED with Arduino without need of and driver IC.

There is 16 Segment LED. 14 segment’s upper and lower segment further divided in to halves in 16 segment. To drive one 16 Segment LED with Arduino, you need Arduino Mega for more Pins. In that case, you have to buy one Common Cathode 16 Segment LED.