I keep a lot of old things that I’ve made. Perhaps too many.

In cleaning out boxes of old

circuit boards – full designs, partial designs, experiments – I found a board that I had put
to a lot of good use. Many times I’ll have a latched 8-bit port on a microcontroller that I
use for debugging or showing status. Running those lines to 8 LEDs is okay, but one
notch better is displaying the value of that port on some seven-segment displays.

In this case the 8-bit output port has the value of 2F hex.

This little board uses two common-cathode 7-segment LEDs to display the value of 8
input lines. Directly driving a seven segment display doesn’t do the job. The display it lit
by a pattern of segments that do not relate to the hexadecimal value on the port. Several
decades ago there was a single chip – MC14495 – that would translate four input lines (a
nibble!) from binary/hex and directly drive a 7-segment LED display.

Notice in the little bit of the data sheet below this ancient (relatively) chip is touted as
good for calculator displays. It has been a looong time since I’ve seen a calculator with
an LED display. Do note, though, that there are resistors built into this device.

Below you can see just how simple the logic is. Four bits of input translate to output lines
that control the LED.
You can see the 7-segment patterns that any specific input will make. All inputs low turn
all of the segments except for segment ‘g’ to make a ‘0′.
The sample schematic below was the base for this little board that I made years ago. I
used it a lot for prototyping, then it disappeared into a box. I’m glad I found it again.
I use the right angle connector on the top of the board originally, but I decided to add the
other connector and document the board. The pic below shows the pin out for this board.
I also added pull-down resistors so that input lines don’t need to be connected.

I searched around on the Internet and I found a place where these obsolete chips are
selling for $15 each. I wonder if I still have a tube full of chips…