If you haven’t played with LED filament (sometimes called LED noodles) it is a fascinating LED material. It’s often used industrially in the manufacture of retro or vintage-looking incandescent-style LED lamps, but it is also now available from maker suppliers in numerous colours and lengths. It offers a massive advantage over things like EL wire in that it’s comparatively bright and easily visible in daylight. Using small 18.5mm 3V LED filaments the InfiDig is an assembled board aiming to make 7-segment displays more visually interesting and give your projects some flair!
The InfiDig on offer is listed as a Beta. It has a couple of bodge wires added to the pre-assembled PCB to make it operational. That said, it’s a budget price and comes completely assembled. The LED filaments are addressed by simple shift registers so it’s pretty trivial to animate and also easy to chain modules together. It’s capable of displaying values between -199 and +199. You’ll need a 3.3-5V supply capable of delivering up to 350mA per InfiDig module. There is a simple PWM control for brightness on board and a custom PlatfromIO library. This makes it a breeze to set up an SPI interface for your microcontroller of choice.
It might be worth looking into a diffuser to place in front of the displays. This can often paradoxically make diffuse light sources easier to read, a tip we picked up from Mike Harrison of mikeselectricstuff!
