Minima Displays

I have been playing around with a number of display options for the Minima.  I found an interesting little board locally for about $12 in single quantities and on eBay for about $5 that has 8 digits of seven segment display, eight tri-colour LEDs and eight push buttons.  It is based on the Titan Micro LED driver chip TM1638.  Here is a good write-up on the device, I won't attempt to replicate it here.

I very quickly modified the Minima code to utilize this display.  It could very easily be further adapted to support the various buttons.  Some of the LCD second line indicators (RX/TX, LSB/USB, etc) could be indicated using tri-colour LEDs.  

I thought folks might be interested in seeing this device and I wanted to get a feel for how difficult it would be to integrate into the Minima code.  Out-of-box, it requires three of the scarce pins on the Arduino, but this can be easily resolved by expanding the I/O pins using a i2c device very similar to what is done with LCD backpacks for i2c.

Here is a photograph of my UNO running Minima version ko7m-AD with modifications for displaying the frequency.  My Minima controller shield is in place but not currently powered.

Anyone interested in further details on this display board should see the links above.  if you have trouble integrating this into your Minima code, drop me a note by email or by comment here and I will do my best to help you succeed.

ko7m at arrl dot net