MAX7219 Vintage Tube LED Clock Kit

Eight-digit MAX7219 LED displays that sit inside glass tubes, for retro-style clocks, counters and readouts.

Highlights

• Three ready, three to build. Three finished eight-digit displays plus three bare driver boards and six four-digit panels to pair up.
• Mix colours and styles. Each driver runs two 0.28-inch four-digit panels as one eight-digit display, in red or blue, with decimal points or a colon.
• Glow-tube look, low voltage. Slide a display into a tube and lay the diffusion sheet over the digits to soften the light.

In the box

• 3 × eight-digit display built into a glass tube: red with decimal points, blue with decimal points, red with a colon
• 6 × loose four-digit 0.28-inch panel: 2 red with decimal points, 2 red with a colon, 2 blue with decimal points
• 3 × MAX7219 driver board, no pins fitted
• 6 × glass tube with a cork stopper
• 1 × black diffusion sheet
• 2 × 40-pin male header strip
• 30 × jumper lead, 150 mm

Specifications

• Driver: MAX7219, 8 digits per display
• Interface: DIN, CLK, CS (3 signal wires + power)
• Supply voltage: 4.0–5.5 V
• Digit size: 0.28 in

Works with

Arduino IDE, MicroPython and CircuitPython. Sample code is on the Lonely Binary GitHub.