Hacking Salvaged LED Displays (Part 1)

You can buy many kinds of standard 7-segment displays, but I prefer hacking salvaged ones you can find in broken e-waste. True, it's easy to buy displays with integrated drivers that make them much easier to connect to a micro-controller and program, but more often than not I end up finding components and making up projects for them, rather than the other way around. In this post I'll show how I salvage a standard single digit 7-seg display, figure out the pinout, and make it do some fun things. In a following post I'll show how I do the same with a more complicated, non-standard, multi-digit salvaged display.