When I saw this listing on Tindie, I was immediately intrigued. What on earth is an RGB Cisterian Display? The layout is like nothing I had ever seen on a segmented display before. So I did a quick Google search and was introduced to a whole new numeral system, developed in the 13th century by John of Basingstoke, archdeacon of Leicester and an adherent of the Cisterian branch of Roman Catholicism.
The numeral system can display numbers from 1 to 9999 in a single symbol, based on the number of strokes and the corner of the glyph in which they appear. There is an excellent chart on Wikipedia Commons that shows every single number that can be contained in a single glyph. Though the glyphs look complex, they are actually just combinations of 9 different strokes, each representing the numbers 1 to 9. Each corner represents a different place in the decimal system; the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands.
If you can learn to read these glyphs quickly, you can represent many more numbers in a smaller place than using typical Arabic numerals. The fact that this display is fully RGB is a bonus — you can make the glyphs any colour or combination of colours you want. You could even use colours in clever ways to add more digits or communicate other information. If you use one of these in your project, you’re bound to get asked questions while simultaneously adding a very cool and unique flair! The GitHub repo has all the technical info for the displays.
As of this writing, the product is out of stock, but since they sold so quickly, Savage Electronics has told me they will be restocking soon! Make sure you join the waitlist so you’ll be notified when they’re back in stock.
