I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — there’s too much fun stuff to do and not enough time to do it all in. Recently, for example, I penned a little Cool Beans Blog on the topic of Droolworthy Electromechanical 7-Segment Displays.

There are a couple of expressions that come to mind, like “Don’t poke a sleeping bear” and “Let sleeping dogs lie.” We might paraphrase these as “Don’t poke a sleeping Max” and “Let a sleeping Max lie.” Unfortunately, either my chum Aubrey is unfamiliar with these sayings or he’s just feeling mischievous, because he sent me an email saying: “Since you like droolworthy flashing LED-based devices, you should check these out — it looks like there’s a NeoPixel for each segment.”

This message was accompanied by a link to an RGB Digit 7-Segment Display column on the Elektor.com website. As we see in this video, a guy called Coen de Bruijn has created a rather tasty 1-inch (~25 mm) tall 7-segment display using eight NeoPixels (one for each of the segments and one for the decimal point).

I have to say that the result is remarkably tasty. I can absolutely see myself using these little scamps for a whole bunch of projects. In fact, the more I look at them, the more I want them!

But wait, there’s more, because almost immediately after reading Aubrey’s message I ran across this RGB 16 Segment LED entry on the Hackaday.io website.

OMG! Using 25 NeoPixels, these 16-Segment displays stand 100 mm (~4 inches) high and 80 mm (~3 inches) wide. It’s sad that the accompanying video shows a test of the display using only white light, but the technicolor images on Elektor’s website more than make up for this oversight.

Now I’m thinking of all the projects I could create using these little beauties. How about you? When you look at these little scamps, do you feel your creative juices starting to slosh around?