Things are very busy as always at Particle (formerly Spark IO) and we have been putting in crazy hours to get the Kickstarter project out the door. As the deadline approaches, one of my work colleagues created a countdown timer. This is one of those timer apps that sits on your desktop. I wondered, wouldn’t it be cool to build a physical one that is connected to the internet? That’s how the idea to build an internet connected seven segment display was born. I could have simply chosen to breadboard such a thing, which I did, but it wasn’t enough. I’ve been itching to build a free-form project much like the BEAM robots I used to build a decade ago. So I decided to take that approach and build this little guy. I call him the ‘SevenSeg’.

Specifications:

Particle Photon as the main controller

LTC 4727JR display

1/32” brass rods for the frame and connections

Powered via micro USB (5VDC)



The construction primarily consists of the Photon without the headers as the base and then a combination of resistors and brass rods form the frame.

The schematic is very straight forward:



As I was programming this guy to display time and the countdown timer, I realized that I could actually give him personality by exhibiting emotions. Since he is connected to the internet, he is never out of sync!

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