7- and 14-segment fonts "DSEG" | Hacker News Reader

7- and 14-segment fonts "DSEG"

keshikan.net

44 pointsanigbrowl8 comments

English: https://www.keshikan.net/fonts-e.html

Discussion (66 points, 3 months ago, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408473

It seems to me that the 7-segment font would work better in all lowercase, specially if you don’t need to differentiate letters from numbers. A lowercase E would be easy, a lowercase G would basically be a 9, and you could do a two-story lowercase A.

I used one of these in a project a month or two back where I wanted an 80s aesthetic. They worked great, once I’d worked out how to simulate displaying “off” segments.

Is it accidentally showing the uppercase font for lowercase characters for 14SEG? the 7SEG's lowercase is actually lowercase

These are neat. Thanks for posting. How common are the hardware displays that support these in real life? The rise and rise of OLEDs seems to make these kinds of displays "so old fashioned", but if the display needs to only display monochrome textual information, these displays would reduce risk, possible points of failure (due to reduced complexity/connections).

These kinds of displays probably are cheaper? ..though OLEDs certainly have economies of scale on their side...

Please comment if any of the above fits with some known devices?

...On the artistic side, this font looks great and could be super useful for building soft prototypes of devices... Which kind of loops back to the reason this font was released is because these devices are still perhaps quite well used?

Uses today? I just got a Giant Grill Gauge and it uses the older style lcd and segmented display. Temp/humidity monitors still use them too. Really comes down to being very easy to integrate and power usage. Being able to run them for months or years even on small batteries is huge.

I wouldn't use 14 segment fonts for real hardware. I find these fonts extremely ugly. Many characters are total abominations and it all feels like a hack.

If you need mostly numbers and only some very basic additional info, I think the classic 7 segment display is fine to display something like On/OFF, Hot, C/F etc.

For better text capabilities there are character displays which don't need many µController pins and usually allow creation of some custom symbols. [1]

Having a fully custom LCD prototype created and maybe having something like 100 pieces manufactured is surprisingly cheap. [2]

And then there's the modern OLED displays of course with full graphics support and colors, but these are usually more expensive and more difficult to drive.

[1] https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Newhaven-Display/NHD-042...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo4_5vG8bbU

very cool

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